If anyone needed a reminder that US health secretary and fervent anti-vaccine advocate Robert F. Kennedy Jr. has no background in science or medicine, look no further than the video he posted on social media Tuesday evening.

In the two-and-a-half-minute clip, Kennedy announced that he is canceling nearly $500 million in funding for the development of mRNA-based vaccines against diseases that pose pandemic threats. The funding will be clawed back from 22 now-defunct contracts awarded through the federal agency tasked with developing medical countermeasures to public health threats. The agency is the Biomedical Advanced Research and Development Authority (BARDA).

Kennedy is generally opposed to vaccines, but he is particularly hostile to mRNA-based vaccines. Since the remarkably successful debut of mRNA COVID-19 vaccines during the COVID-19 pandemic—which were developed and mass-produced with unprecedented speed—Kennedy has continually disparaged and spread misinformation about them.

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By now, you’ve likely heard of fraudulent calls that use AI to clone the voice of people the call recipient knows. Often, the result is what sounds like a grandchild, CEO, or work colleague you’ve known for years reporting an urgent matter requiring immediate action, saying wiring money, divulging login credentials, or visiting a malicious website.

Researchers and government officials have been warning of the threat for years, with the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency saying in 2023 that threats from deepfakes and other forms of synthetic media have increased “exponentially.” Last year, Google’s Mandiant security division reported that such attacks are being executed with “uncanny precision, creating for more realistic phishing schemes.”

Anatomy of a deepfake scam call

On Wednesday, security firm Group-IB outlined the basic steps involved in executing these sorts of attacks. The takeaway is that they’re easy to reproduce at scale and can be challenging to detect or repel.

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"Crypto mixers" exist because of a peculiar feature of cryptocurrencies—most are fully traceable using their public blockchain ledgers. To provide more privacy to crypto account owners, a mixer will let people toss their crypto into a large pool, where it is "mixed" with other people's crypto. At a later date, each crypto owner can choose to withdraw their money from the pool into a new, anonymous wallet, thus making the movement of the crypto harder to track.

Of course, the obfuscation doesn't work well if the blockchain shows 1,231.7 BTC entering a mixer and 1,231.7 BTC being withdrawn to a new wallet. So mixers will take steps to disguise the transactions. Tornado Cash, which operated on the Ethereum blockchain, mandated that users could only deposit money into its pools in 0.1, 1, 10, and 100 ETH increments, making it far harder to spot specific amounts entering and leaving the mixer.

Tornado Cash also used a complex system of "relayers" to pay the Ethereum "gas fees" charged for transactions on the network; without doing this, it would be clear which old account was paying to "mix" money into which new account. The whole process relied on the use of irrevocable "smart contracts," all of which sounds rather technically daunting, but Tornado put a nice user interface atop the details that made the service far easier to use than it might sound.

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OpenAI has announced an agreement to supply more than 2 million workers for the US federal executive branch access to ChatGPT and related tools at practically no cost: just $1 per agency for one year.

The deal was announced just one day after the US General Services Administration (GSA) signed a blanket deal to allow OpenAI and rivals like Google and Anthropic to supply tools to federal workers.

The workers will have access to ChatGPT Enterprise, a type of account that includes access to frontier models and cutting-edge features with relatively high token limits, alongside a more robust commitment to data privacy than general consumers of ChatGPT get. ChatGPT Enterprise has been trialed over the past several months at several corporations and other types of large organizations.

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Bob Iger, the CEO of The Walt Disney Company, announced today that Disney will "fully integrate" Hulu into the Disney+ app in 2026. Although a company representative told Variety that people will still be able to buy standalone subscriptions to Hulu, we can't help but wonder how long that will last.

A prim and polished app combining the catalogs, recommendations, and profiles for Disney+ and Hulu subscribers could make a standalone Hulu app redundant. In fact, the ability to successfully combine those two streaming services into one platform could, depending on how executives look at it, make the entire Hulu business redundant.

Some are reporting that Iger means that the Hulu app will be phased out next year , while others are saying that the death of the Hulu app is likely but not yet guaranteed .

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The Library of Congress today said a coding error resulted in the deletion of parts of the US Constitution from Congress' website and promised a fix after many Internet users pointed out the missing sections this morning.

"It has been brought to our attention that some sections of Article 1 are missing from the Constitution Annotated ( constitution.congress.gov ) website," the Library of Congress said today . "We've learned that this is due to a coding error. We have been working to correct this and expect it to be resolved soon."

The missing portions of the Constitution were restored to one part of the website a few hours after the Library of Congress statement and reappeared on a different part of the website another hour or so later. The Constitution Annotated website carried a notice saying it "is currently experiencing data issues. We are working to resolve this issue and regret the inconvenience."

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Google has often bristled at the implication that its obsession with AI search is harming web traffic , and now search head Liz Reid has penned a blog post on the topic. According to Reid, clicks aren't declining, AI is driving more searches, and everything is fine on the Internet. But despite the optimistic tone, the post stops short of providing any actual data to back up those claims.

This statement feels like a direct response to a recent Pew Research Center analysis that showed searches with AI Overviews resulted in lower click-through rates . Google objected to the conclusions and methodology of that study, and the new blog post expands on its rationale.

The banner claim in this post is that Google is not sending fewer clicks to websites. According to Reid, "total organic click volume" has remained "relatively stable year-over-year." Meanwhile, Google is seeing more searches on its end, which is the most important metric for the company. Google's blog also notes (fairly) that the web is unfathomably vast, and it's common for trends to shift.

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About five years from now, a modified Dragon spacecraft will begin to fire its Draco thrusters, pushing the International Space Station out of its orbit and sending the largest object humans have built in space inexorably to the bottom of the Pacific Ocean.

And then what?

China's Tiangong Space Station will still be going strong. NASA, however, faces a serious risk of losing its foothold in low-Earth orbit. Space agency leaders have long recognized this and nearly half a decade ago awarded about $500 million to four different companies to begin working on "commercial" space stations to fill the void.

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In 2008, a YouTube video featuring an Eleanora cockatoo named Snowball dancing to the beat of the Backstreet Boys went viral. His killer moves stunned scientists, since the ability to synchronize body movements to music was believed to be a uniquely human activity. Nor is Snowball an isolated case. Griffi the Dancing Cockatoo has his own YouTube channel, for example, and a recent TikTok video showed two sister cockatoos engaging in a dance-off to Earth, Wind & Fire's "September." But it's Snowball who holds the Guinness World Record for most dance moves performed by a bird.

Snowball's record might be in jeopardy, however. A new paper published in the journal PLoS ONE investigated dancing behavior in several parrot species and identified 30 distinct dance moves that the birds executed—17 of which had never been observed scientifically before and were performed by just one bird. So dancing in cockatoos and other parrot species seems to be much more complex and varied than previously thought. It's still unclear why parrots in captivity love to dance so much, but encouraging such behavior could help birds like these thrive in an environment they often find challenging.

Researchers at Charles Sturt University (CSU) in Australia scoured YouTube, Facebook, and TikTok for video footage of dancing birds, particularly cockatoos. For videos to be selected for inclusion in the study, they had to meet several criteria: They had to show a cockatoo in a domestic setting where music was being played at the same time the bird was dancing (videos where music had been added to the footage were omitted); the bird must demonstrate at least two different dance moves; and the camera angle had to provide a good view of the dancing bird. And each video had to feature a different bird.

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