This week, the US health department announced a plan to ban prescription fluoride supplements for children . These ingested fluoride products are dispensed at safe doses by doctors and dentists to prevent tooth decay in children who are unable to get adequate fluoride doses from community water systems—something that may become more common as more states and cities remove or ban fluoride from their water.

Both the American Dental Association (ADA) and the American Academy of Pediatrics recommend fluoridating community water and advise prescribing fluoride supplements for children who do not get adequate fluoride dosages through their water.

Nevertheless, the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) under anti-vaccine advocate and conspiracy theorist Robert F. Kennedy Jr states without clear evidence that fluoride supplements harm children's microbiome and pose other health risks.

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This week, Spotify rushed to remove hundreds of obviously fake podcasts found to be marketing prescription drugs in violation of Spotify's policies and, likely, federal law.

On Thursday, Business Insider (BI) reported that Spotify removed 200 podcasts advertising the sale of opioids and other drugs, but that wasn't the end of the scandal. Today, CNN revealed that it easily uncovered dozens more fake podcasts peddling drugs.

Some of the podcasts may have raised a red flag for a human moderator—with titles like "My Adderall Store" or "Xtrapharma.com" and episodes titled "Order Codeine Online Safe Pharmacy Louisiana" or "Order Xanax 2 mg Online Big Deal On Christmas Season," CNN reported.

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For a short period of time on Friday, Darth Vader could drop F-bombs in the video game Fortnite as part of a voice AI implementation gone wrong, reports GameSpot . Epic Games rapidly deployed a hotfix after players encountered the Sith Lord responding to their comments with profanity and strong language.

In Fortnite , the AI-voiced Vader appears as both a boss in battle royale mode and an interactive character. The official Star Wars website encourages players to "ask him all your pressing questions about the Force, the Galactic Empire… or you know, a good strat for the last Storm circle," adding that "the Sith Lord has opinions."

The F-bomb incident involved a Twitch streamer named Loserfruit, who triggered the forceful response when discussing food with the virtual Vader. The Dark Lord of the Sith responded by repeating her words "freaking" and "fucking" before adding, "Such vulgarity does not become you, Padme." The exchange spread virally across social media platforms on Friday.

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The rapid expansion of generative AI has changed the way Google and other tech giants design products, but most of the AI features you've used are running on remote servers with a ton of processing power. Your phone has a lot less power , but Google appears poised to give developers some important new mobile AI tools. At I/O next week, Google will likely announce a new set of APIs to let developers leverage the capabilities of Gemini Nano for on-device AI.

Google has quietly published documentation on big new AI features for developers. According to Android Authority , an update to the ML Kit SDK will add API support for on-device generative AI features via Gemini Nano. It's built on AI Core, similar to the experimental Edge AI SDK, but it plugs into an existing model with a set of predefined features that should be easy for developers to implement.

Google says ML Kit’s GenAI APIs will enable apps to do summarization, proofreading, rewriting, and image description without sending data to the cloud. However, Gemini Nano doesn't have as much power as the cloud-based version, so expect some limitations. For example, Google notes that summaries can only have a maximum of three bullet points, and image descriptions will only be available in English. The quality of outputs could also vary based on the version of Gemini Nano on a phone. The standard version (Gemini Nano XS) is about 100MB in size, but Gemini Nano XXS as seen on the Pixel 9a is a quarter of the size. It's text-only and has a much smaller context window.

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News broke yesterday that researchers in Philadelphia appear to have successfully treated a 6-month-old baby boy , called KJ, with a personalized CRISPR gene-editing therapy. The treatment corrects an ultra-rare mutation in KJ that breaks a liver enzyme. That enzyme is required to convert ammonia, a byproduct of metabolism, to urea, a waste product released in urine. Without treatment, ammonia would build up to dangerous levels in KJ—and he would have a 50 percent chance of dying in infancy.

While the gene-editing treatment isn't a complete cure, and long-term success is still uncertain, KJ's condition has improved and stabilized. And the treatment's positive results appear to be a first for personalizing gene editing.

Now, who doesn't love a good story about a seemingly miraculous medical treatment saving a cute, chubby-cheeked baby? But, this story delivers more than an adorable bundle of joy; the big triumph is the striking timeline of the treatment's development—and the fact that it provides a template for how to treat other babies with ultra-rare mutations.

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We've been expecting it for a while, and now it's here: OpenAI has introduced an agentic coding tool called Codex in research preview. The tool is meant to allow experienced developers to delegate rote and relatively simple programming tasks to an AI agent that will generate production-ready code and show its work along the way.

Codex is a unique interface (not to be confused with the Codex CLI tool introduced by OpenAI last month) that can be reached from the side bar in the ChatGPT web app. Users enter a prompt and then click either "code" to have it begin producing code, or "ask" to have it answer questions and advise.

Whenever it's given a task, that task is performed in a distinct container that is preloaded with the user's codebase and is meant to accurately reflect their development environment.

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As we often like to remind people, beware buying any car in its first model year. It takes a little while for any OEM to find its feet with a new model, and now there's half-baked software that can need frequent updating to worry about in addition to any mechanical woes. I bring this up because various bugs meant that an electric car we were supposed to review had to be repeatedly postponed, as it was away being fixed, and as a result our week with the 2025 Volvo V60 Cross Country turned into two. And what a pleasant two weeks they were.

The Volvo station wagon is not in its first production year. Any criticism of its onboard electronics would focus more on the fact that they are now increasingly vintage, but that also means the bugs have mostly been squashed by now. Sadly, Volvo killed off the regular V60 station wagon earlier this year, but you can still buy the Cross Country version, which starts at $51,495, including the delivery charge.

As the name probably implies, the V60 Cross Country has some adaptations for unpaved roads: it rides a little higher and on softer suspension, and there's protective cladding here and there that gives this wagon a bit of a bold stance.

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How did reptilian things that looked something like crocodiles get to the Caribbean islands from South America millions of years ago? They probably walked.

The existence of any prehistoric apex predators in the islands of the Caribbean used to be doubted. While their absence would have probably made it even more of a paradise for prey animals, fossils unearthed in Cuba, Puerto Rico, and the Dominican Republic have revealed that these islands were crawling with monster crocodyliform species called sebecids, ancient relatives of crocodiles.

While sebecids first emerged during the Cretaceous, this is the first evidence of them lurking outside South America during the Cenozoic epoch, which began 66 million years ago. An international team of researchers has found that these creatures would stalk and hunt in the Caribbean islands millions of years after similar predators went extinct on the South American mainland. Lower sea levels back then could have exposed enough land to walk across.

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Meta thinks there's no reason to carry on with its defense after the Federal Trade Commission closed its monopoly case, and the company has moved to end the trial early by claiming that the FTC utterly failed to prove its case.

"The FTC has no proof that Meta has monopoly power," Meta's motion for judgment filed Thursday said, "and therefore the court should rule in favor of Meta."

According to Meta, the FTC failed to show evidence that "the overall quality of Meta’s apps has declined" or that the company shows too many ads to users. Meta says that's "fatal" to the FTC's case that the company wielded monopoly power to pursue more ad revenue while degrading user experience over time (an Internet trend known as " enshittification" ). And on top of allegedly showing no evidence of "ad load, privacy, integrity, and features" degradation on Meta apps, Meta argued there's no precedent for an antitrust claim rooted in this alleged harm.

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