Enlarge / A press photo of the Nvidia H100 Tensor Core GPU. (credit: Nvidia )

The US acted aggressively last year to limit China’s ability to develop artificial intelligence for military purposes, blocking the sale there of the most advanced US chips used to train AI systems.

Big advances in the chips used to develop generative AI have meant that the latest US technology on sale in China is more powerful than anything available before. That is despite the fact that the chips have been deliberately hobbled for the Chinese market to limit their capabilities, making them less effective than products available elsewhere in the world.

The result has been soaring Chinese orders for the latest advanced US processors. China’s leading Internet companies have placed orders for $5 billion worth of chips from Nvidia, whose graphical processing units have become the workhorse for training large AI models.

Enlarge / President Joe Biden speaks in the Roosevelt Room of the White House on May 13, 2021. (credit: Getty Images | Bloomberg)

A year ago, President Joe Biden launched a new era of US industrial policy, signing into law the Inflation Reduction Act and the Chips and Science Act. Passed within days of each other last August, the two laws offered more than $400 billion in tax credits, loans, and subsidies, all designed to spark development of a domestic cleantech and semiconductor supply chain.

Over the past year, the Financial Times has identified more than 110 large-scale manufacturing announcements—including in semiconductors, electric vehicles, batteries, and solar and wind parts—spurred by the landmark legislation. We have examined them and spoken to experts, and here is what we have learned.

$224 billion worth of projects and 100,000 jobs

At least $224 billion in cleantech and semiconductor manufacturing projects have been announced in the US since the passage of the IRA and the Chips Act. In total, they promise to create 100,000 jobs. The FT tallied company announcements of at least $100 million from August 2022 to this week.

Enlarge (credit: Savusia Konstantin | Getty Images )

Thousands of websites belonging to US government agencies, leading universities, and professional organizations have been hijacked over the last half decade and used to push scammy offers and promotions, new research has found. Many of these scams are aimed at children and attempt to trick them into downloading apps, malware, or submitting personal details in exchange for nonexistent rewards in Fortnite and Roblox .

For more than three years, security researcher Zach Edwards has been tracking these website hijackings and scams. He says the activity can be linked back to the activities of affiliate users of one advertising company. The US-registered company acts as a service that sends web traffic to a range of online advertisers, allowing individuals to sign up and use its systems. However, on any given day, Edwards, a senior manager of threat insights at Human Security , uncovers scores of .gov, .org, and .edu domains being compromised.

“This group is what I would consider to be the number one group at bulk compromising infrastructure across the Internet and hosting scams on it and other types of exploits,” Edwards says. The scale of the website compromises—which are ongoing—and the public nature of the scams makes them stand out, the researcher says.

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One of your Mac's built-in malware detection tools may not be working quite as well as you think. At the Defcon hacker conference in Las Vegas, longtime Mac security researcher Patrick Wardle presented findings on Saturday about vulnerabilities in Apple's macOS Background Task Management mechanism, which could be exploited to bypass and, therefore, defeat the company's recently added monitoring tool.

There's no foolproof method for catching malware on computers with perfect accuracy because, at their core, malicious programs are just software, like your web browser or chat app. It can be difficult to tell the legitimate programs from the transgressors. So operating system makers like Microsoft and Apple, as well as third-party security companies, are always working to develop new detection mechanisms and tools that can spot potentially malicious software behavior in new ways.

Apple's Background Task Management tool focuses on watching for software “persistence.” Malware can be designed to be ephemeral and operate only briefly on a device or until the computer restarts. But it can also be built to establish itself more deeply and “persist” on a target even when the computer is shut down and rebooted. Lots of legitimate software needs persistence so all of your apps and data and preferences will show up as you left them every time you turn on your device. But if software establishes persistence unexpectedly or out of the blue, it could be a sign of something malicious.

Enlarge / Researchers use CyBio FeliX workstations to extract and purify DNA samples for testing (credit: LabGenius)

At an old biscuit factory in South London, giant mixers and industrial ovens have been replaced by robotic arms, incubators, and DNA sequencing machines. James Field and his company LabGenius aren’t making sweet treats; they’re cooking up a revolutionary, AI-powered approach to engineering new medical antibodies.

In nature, antibodies are the body’s response to disease and serve as the immune system’s front-line troops. They’re strands of protein that are specially shaped to stick to foreign invaders so that they can be flushed from the system. Since the 1980s, pharmaceutical companies have been making synthetic antibodies to treat diseases like cancer, and to reduce the chance of transplanted organs being rejected.

Enlarge / Elkhorn coral fragments rescued from overheating ocean nurseries sit in cooler water at Keys Marine Laboratory. (credit: NOAA )

Armed with scrub brushes, young scuba divers took to the waters of Florida’s Alligator Reef in late July to try to help corals struggling to survive 2023’s extraordinary marine heat wave. They carefully scraped away harmful algae and predators impinging on staghorn fragments, under the supervision and training of interns from Islamorada Conservation and Restoration Education , or I.CARE.

Normally, I.CARE’s volunteer divers would be transplanting corals to waters off the Florida Keys this time of year, as part of a national effort to restore the Florida Reef . But this year, everything is going in reverse.

As water temperatures spiked in the Florida Keys, scientists from universities, coral reef restoration groups, and government agencies launched a heroic effort to save the corals. Divers have been in the water every day, collecting thousands of corals from ocean nurseries along the Florida Keys reef tract and moving them to cooler water and into giant tanks on land.

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Google and Universal Music are in talks to license artists’ melodies and voices for songs generated by artificial intelligence as the music business tries to monetize one of its biggest threats.

The discussions, confirmed by four people familiar with the matter, aim to strike a partnership for an industry that is grappling with the implications of new AI technology.

The rise of generative AI has bred a surge in “deepfake” songs that can convincingly mimic the voices, lyrics, or sound of established artists, often without their consent.

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Internal dissent within the mostly volunteer disease-news network known as ProMED—which alerted the world to the earliest cases of COVID , Middle East Respiratory Syndrome (MERS), and SARS—has broken out into the open and threatens to take down the internationally treasured network unless an external sponsor can be found.

The struggle for the future of the low-tech site, which also sends out each piece of content on a no-reply email list with 20,000 subscribers, has been captured in dueling posts to its front page. On July 14, a post by ProMED’s chief content officer, a veterinarian and infectious-disease expert named Jarod Hanson , announced that ProMED is running out of money. Because it is being undermined by data-scraping and reselling of its content, Hanson wrote, ProMED would turn off its RSS and Twitter feeds, limit access to its decades of archives to the previous 30 days, and introduce paid subscriptions.

Enlarge / Researchers at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in California have used the world’s most powerful laser to fuse the nuclei of hydrogen isotope. (credit: John Jett & Jake Long/Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory/Reuters)

US government scientists have achieved net energy gain in a fusion reaction for the second time, a result that is set to fuel optimism that progress is being made toward the dream of limitless, zero-carbon power.

Physicists have since the 1950s sought to harness the fusion reaction that powers the Sun, but until December no group had been able to produce more energy from the reaction than it consumes—a condition also known as ignition.

Researchers at the federal Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in California, who achieved ignition for the first time last year, repeated the breakthrough in an experiment on July 30 that produced a higher energy output than in December, according to three people with knowledge of the preliminary results.