Enlarge / A recall notice is posted next to Boar's Head meats that are displayed at a Safeway store on July 31, 2024, in San Rafael, California. (credit: Getty | Justin Sullivan )

A third person has died in a nationwide bacterial outbreak linked to Boar's Head brand deli meats. Last week, the company recalled more than 7 million pounds of its meats , which was in addition to a recall of over 200,000 pounds of meat from July 26. In all, 71 types of products made between May 10, 2024, and July 29, 2024, and sold nationwide have been recalled.

According to an update Thursday from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention , the outbreak has now sickened a total of 43 people, an increase from 34 last week. There have been 43 hospitalizations, up from 33 last week. The illnesses are reported from 13 states. The three deaths in the outbreak include one from Illinois and one from New Jersey, and the newly reported death is from Virginia. The CDC expects the tally of illnesses so far to be a significant undercount of actual cases, and additional states may be affected.

The illnesses in the outbreak are caused by Listeria monocytogenes , a foodborne bacterium that is particularly dangerous to people who are pregnant, people aged 65 years or older, and people who have weakened immune systems. In these high-risk groups, the bacteria are more likely to move beyond the gastrointestinal system to cause an invasive infection called listeriosis. During pregnancy, listeriosis can cause miscarriage, stillbirth, premature delivery, or a life-threatening infection in newborns. For non-pregnant people who develop listeriosis, nearly 90 percent require hospitalization, and one in six die.

Enlarge / The round lens of PrivacyLens captures standard digital video while the square lens senses heat. The heat sensor improves the camera's ability to spot and remove people from videos. (credit: Brenda Ahearn, Michigan Engineering)

Roombas can be both convenient and fun, particularly for cats who like to ride on top of the machines as they make their cleaning rounds. But the obstacle-avoidance cameras collect images of the environment—sometimes rather personal images, as was the case in 2020 when images of a young woman on the toilet captured by a Romba leaked to social media after being uploaded to a cloud server. It's a vexing problem in this very online digital age, in which Internet-connected cameras are used in a variety of home monitoring and health applications, as well as more public-facing applications like autonomous vehicles and security cameras.

University of Michigan (UM) engineers have been developing a possible solution: PrivacyLens, a new camera that can detect people in images based on body temperature and replace their likeness with a generic stick figure. They have filed a provisional patent for the device, described in a recent paper published in the Proceedings on Privacy Enhancing Technologies Symposium, held last month .

"Most consumers do not think about what happens to the data collected by their favorite smart home devices. In most cases, raw audio, images and videos are being streamed off these devices to the manufacturers' cloud-based servers, regardless of whether or not the data is actually needed for the end application," said co-author Alanson Sample . "A smart device that removes personally identifiable information (PII) before sensitive data is sent to private servers will be a far safer product than what we currently have."

Enlarge (credit: NurPhoto / Contributor | NurPhoto )

FTX, the bankrupt cryptocurrency exchange formerly helmed by fraudster Sam Bankman-Fried , has agreed to pay $12.7 billion to customers blindsided by Bankman-Fried's deceptions covering up FTX's flagrant misuse of customer funds.

In an order yesterday, US District Judge P. Kevin Castel said that FTX must pay $8.7 billion in restitution to victims of Bankman-Fried's fraudulent scheme, as well as disgorge another $4 billion in "gains received in connection with the violations" to further compensate customers who suffered significant losses.

According to Ian McGinley , the division of enforcement director for the Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC), "this multi-billion-dollar recovery for victims" is "the largest such recovery in CFTC history." And the CFTC "achieved it with remarkable speed," McGinley boasted.

Enlarge (credit: Sonos)

Addressing blowback from Sonos' wildly unpopular app redesign will cost the company $20 to $30 million "in the short term," according to CEO Patrick Spence.

In May, Sonos launched an updated app that aggravated many users due to its removal of common functions, like accessibility features and the ability to edit playlists and song queues, use sleep timers, and access local music libraries. Sonos said it wanted to modernize the app's interface and make it easier to navigate. While the app initially succeeded in making certain things quicker, like adjusting the volume, the changes caused outrage among Sonos' typically loyal user base . In July, Spence apologized for the maligned redesign and said Sonos would fix the app with biweekly updates .

During Sonos' fiscal Q3 2024 earnings call yesterday, Spence said that fixing the app and managing related customer fallout will cost Sonos millions. The costs come from three primary areas—app updates, customer support, and winning back customers and partners—and are “necessary to right the ship for the long term," Spence said.

Enlarge / Amina Abakarova allegedly spreading mercury on her rival's chess board.

Russia is no stranger to unique poisonings. State agents have been known to use everything from polonium-laced tea to the deadly nerve agent "novichok" when making assassination attempts against both defectors in the UK and internal political rivals like Alexei Navalny . But a new "first" in the long history of poisonings was opened this month in the Russian republic of Dagestan, where a 40-something chess player named Amina Abakarova attempted to poison a rival by depositing liquid mercury on and around her chess board.

Malcolm Pein, the English Chess Federation's director of international chess, told the UK's Telegraph that he had “never seen anything like this before... This is the first recorded case of somebody using a toxic substance, to my knowledge, in the history of the game of chess." Usually, he said, chess rivals confine themselves to "psychological" tactics.

Oliver Carroll, a Ukraine war correspondent for The Economist, summed up the situation with some social media snark : "I know that on the standards of Russian doping it's perhaps only a 7 out of 10. But still..."

Enlarge (credit: Getty Images | SOPA Images)

An advertising industry initiative targeted by an Elon Musk lawsuit is "discontinuing" its activities and has deleted the member list from its website.

On Tuesday, Musk's X Corp. sued the World Federation of Advertisers (WFA) over what X claims is an illegal boycott spearheaded by a WFA initiative called the Global Alliance for Responsible Media (GARM). The WFA isn't disbanding but is halting GARM's activities, and the GARM member page now produces a 404 error. An archived version of the page from yesterday shows the initiative members, including X.

X's antitrust lawsuit has drawn skeptical responses from law professors, who say it will be difficult to prove that companies violated antitrust laws by stopping advertisements. But while X may never obtain financial damages from the advertising group or corporations like CVS and Unilever that it also named as defendants, fighting the lawsuit could be costly.

Enlarge / Apple's M2 Pro Mac mini. (credit: Andrew Cunningham)

Apple hasn't updated its Mac mini desktop lineup since the beginning of 2023 , when it added M2 and M2 Pro chips and discontinued the last of the Intel models. Bloomberg's Mark Gurman reports that the update drought will end later this year, when the mini will skip right from the M2 to the M4 , something he originally reported back in April.

But the mini will reportedly come with more than just new chips: it will also get a new, smaller design, which Gurman says will be closer in size to an Apple TV box (specifically, he says it may be a bit taller, but will have a substantially smaller footprint). The new mini could have "at least three USB-C ports," as well as a power connector and an HDMI port.

This would be Apple's first overhaul of the Mac mini's design since the original aluminum unibody version was released back in June of 2010 . That model did include a slot for a built-in SuperDrive DVD burner, something Apple dropped from later models as optical drives became less necessary, but the M2 Mac mini has the same basic design and the same footprint as that Core 2 Duo Mac mini introduced over a decade ago.

Enlarge (credit: Benj Edwards / Google DeepMind)

On Wednesday, researchers at Google DeepMind revealed the first AI-powered robotic table tennis player capable of competing at an amateur human level. The system combines an industrial robot arm called the ABB IRB 1100 and custom AI software from DeepMind. While an expert human player can still defeat the bot, the system demonstrates the potential for machines to master complex physical tasks that require split-second decision-making and adaptability.

"This is the first robot agent capable of playing a sport with humans at human level," the researchers wrote in a preprint paper listed on arXiv. "It represents a milestone in robot learning and control."

The unnamed robot agent (we suggest "AlphaPong"), developed by a team that includes David B. D'Ambrosio, Saminda Abeyruwan, and Laura Graesser, showed notable performance in a series of matches against human players of varying skill levels. In a study involving 29 participants, the AI-powered robot won 45 percent of its matches, demonstrating solid amateur-level play. Most notably, it achieved a 100 percent win rate against beginners and a 55 percent win rate against intermediate players, though it struggled against advanced opponents.

Enlarge / Absolute temperatures show how similar July 2023 and 2024 were. (credit: C3S/ECMWF )

The past several years have been absolute scorchers, with 2023 being the warmest year ever recorded. And things did not slow down in 2024. As a result, we entered a stretch where every month set a new record as the warmest iteration of that month that we've ever recorded. Last month, that pattern stretched out for a full 12 months , as June of 2024 once again became the warmest June ever recorded. But, despite some exceptional temperatures in July, it fell just short of last July's monthly temperature record, bringing the streak to a close.

Europe's Copernicus system was first to announce that July of 2024 was ever so slightly cooler than July of 2023, missing out on setting a new record by just 0.04° C. So far, none of the other major climate trackers, such as Berkeley Earth or NASA GISS, have come out with data for July. These each have slightly different approaches to tracking temperatures, and, with a margin that small, it's possible we'll see one of them register last month as warmer or statistically indistinguishable.

How exceptional are the temperatures of the last few years? The EU averaged every July from 1991 to 2020—a period well after climate change had warmed the planet significantly—and July of 2024 was still 0.68° C above that average.