An ill wind blows through the automotive industry. Yesterday, after the market closed, Rivian reported its results for the second quarter of 2025, and they weren't great. Unlike the last two quarters, Rivian did not make a gross profit, and it's estimating it will have a larger loss this year than first predicted. A day earlier, it was Lucid's turn: The Saudi-backed EV startup also missed analyst estimates for the quarter, and Lucid says it will build fewer cars this year than originally planned.

"We delivered solid performance despite a challenging macroeconomic backdrop, thanks to the adaptability and focus of our team in navigating a dynamic environment," said Taoufiq Boussaid in an elegant bit of business-speak that elides the true horror of the situation.

In both cases, the reasons for these underwhelming performances were the same: US government policies. Since taking office in January, President Trump and the Republican Party have been hard at work tearing up environmental regulations and overturning policies meant to encourage EV adoption, as well fomenting a global trade war through the imposition of irrational and costly tariffs.

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Biology is one of the areas in which AI and machine learning approaches have seen some spectacular successes, such as designing enzymes to digest plastics and proteins to block snake venom . But in an era of seemingly endless AI hype, it might be easy to think that we could just set AI loose on the mounds of data we've already generated and end up with a good understanding of most areas of biology, allowing us to skip a lot of messy experiments and the unpleasantness of research on animals.

But biology involves a whole lot more than just protein structures. And it's extremely premature to suggest that AI can be equally effective at handling all aspects of biology. So we were intrigued to see a study comparing a set of AI software packages designed to predict how active genes will be in cells exposed to different conditions. As it turns out, the AI systems couldn't manage to do any better than a deliberately simplified method of predicting.

The results serve as a useful caution that biology is incredibly complex, and developing AI systems that work for one aspect of it is not an indication that they can work for biology generally.

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US state legislatures are where the action is for placing guardrails around artificial intelligence technologies, given the lack of meaningful federal regulation. The resounding defeat in Congress of a proposed moratorium on state-level AI regulation means states are free to continue filling the gap.

Several states have already enacted legislation around the use of AI. All 50 states have introduced various AI-related legislation in 2025.

Four aspects of AI in particular stand out from a regulatory perspective: government use of AI, AI in health care, facial recognition, and generative AI.

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The head of NASA has decided to move one of the agency's retired space shuttles to Houston, but which one seems to still be up in the air.

Senator John Cornyn (R-Texas), who earlier this year introduced and championed an effort to relocate the space shuttle Discovery from the Smithsonian to Space Center Houston, issued a statement on Tuesday evening (August 5) applauding the decision by acting NASA Administrator Sean Duffy.

"There is no better place for one of NASA's space shuttles to be displayed than Space City," said Cornyn in the statement. "Since the inception of our nation's human space exploration program, Houston has been at the center of our most historic achievements, from training the best and brightest to voyage into the great unknown to putting the first man on the moon."

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In a small randomized controlled trial, people lost twice as much weight when their diet was limited to minimally processed food compared to when they switched to a diet that included ultraprocessed versions of foods but was otherwise nutritionally matched.

The trial, published in Nature Medicine by researchers at University College London, adds to a growing body of evidence that food processing, in addition to simple nutrition content, influences our weight and health. Ultraprocessed foods have already been vilified for their link to obesity—largely through weaker observational studies—but researchers have struggled to shore up the connection with high-quality studies and understand their impact on health.

The ultraprocessed foods researchers provided in the new trial were relatively healthy ones—as ultraprocessed foods go. They included things like multigrain breakfast cereal, packaged granola bars, flavored yogurt cups, fruit snacks, commercially premade chicken sandwiches, instant noodles, and ready-made lasagna. But, in the minimally processed trial diet, participants received meals from a caterer rather than ones from a grocery store aisle. The diet included overnight oats with fresh fruit, plain yogurt with toasted oats and fruit, handmade fruit and nut bars, freshly made chicken salad, and from-scratch stir fry and spaghetti bolognese.

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Apple released a new developer beta build of macOS 26 Tahoe today, and it came with another big update for a familiar icon. The old Macintosh HD hard drive icon, for years represented by a facsimile of an old spinning hard drive, has been replaced with something clearly intended to resemble a solid-state drive (the SSD in your Mac actually looks like a handful of chips soldered to a circuit board, but we'll forgive the creative license).

The Macintosh HD icon became less visible a few years back, when new macOS installs stopped showing your internal disk on the desktop by default. It has also been many years since Apple shifted to SSDs as the primary boot media for new Macs. It's not clear why the icon is being replaced now, instead of years ago—maybe the icon had started clicking , and Apple just wanted to replace it before it suffered from catastrophic icon failure—but regardless, the switch is logical (this is a computer storage pun).

An iconic life

The original hard drive icon dates back to 2000, when Apple introduced the new look-and-feel of Mac OS X to the public through the third of four public developer betas (scroll down far enough in our original coverage, and you can spot the hard drive icon in some of the screenshots).

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The Trump administration is telling states they will be shut out of a $42 billion broadband deployment fund if they set the rates that Internet service providers receiving subsidies are allowed to charge people with low incomes.

The latest version of the National Telecommunications and Information Administration (NTIA) FAQ on the grant program, released today, is a challenge to states considering laws that would force Internet providers to offer cheap plans to people who meet income eligibility guidelines. One state already has such a law: New York requires ISPs with over 20,000 customers in the state to offer $15 broadband plans with download speeds of at least 25Mbps, or $20-per-month service with 200Mbps speeds.

Other states have been considering similar laws, and were initially emboldened by New York winning a yearslong court battle against ISPs that tried to invalidate the state law. But states may now be dissuaded by the Trump administration's stance against price mandates being applied to the grant program.

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In a 300-plus page final report released today, the US Coast Guard analyzed the 2023 Titan sub implosion from every conceivable angle and came to a clear conclusion: OceanGate CEO Stockton Rush was a dangerous and deeply unpleasant boss.

His company used "intimidation tactics" to sidestep regulatory scrutiny, it was a "toxic" workplace, and its safety culture was "critically flawed." The Titan itself was "undocumented, unregistered, non-certificated, [and] unclassed." As for Rush, he managed to "completely ignore vital inspections, data analyses, and preventative maintenance procedures." The result was a "catastrophic event" that occurred when 4,930 pounds per square inch of water pressure cracked the sub open and crushed its five occupants during a dive to the Titanic wreckage site.

Had Rush somehow survived, the report says, he would have been referred for prosecution.

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A lot of people are overly reliant on Google. They put all of their important messages, appointments, musings, contacts, and spreadsheets into Google products. Many are aware that Google, like many tech firms, is likely to prioritize its own interests over user privacy. But signing data away for technological conveniences is a common occurrence.

Murena's Pixel Tablet takes a stance against that norm. It's Google’s Pixel Tablet hardware running an Android fork but without any Google tracking or Google apps. While I still found myself heading back to Google services while using the tablet, Murena’s gadget reminded me of how feasible it is to limit Big Tech’s reach into my life.

De-Googled Android

Instead of running standard Android like Google’s 2023 Pixel Tablet , Murena’s Pixel Tablet runs /e/OS, an open source mobile operating system (OS) built by e Foundation . Mandrake Linux distribution creator Gaël Duval founded /e/OS, which is a fork of LineageOS , an open source version of Google's Android source code.

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