Lawsuit Accuses xAI of Training Grok on Child Sexual Abuse Material: A new lawsuit accuses xAI of training its Grok chatbot on child sexual abuse material (CSAM). The plaintiff, identified as Jane Doe, was abused as a preschooler in the early 2000s to produce CSAM later hashed by child-safety organizations. She alleges that material bearing her known hash values was part of the dataset used to build Grok’s image and video generation tools, and that Grok’s policy of using public X posts and its own outputs as training data means AI-generated CSAM depicting her may also have fed back into the model. The suit, a proposed class action, cites violations of federal child pornography law and Masha’s Law, and seeks damages plus an order forcing xAI to destroy and stop generating such content. (Ars Technica)
Microgravity Could Turn Orbit Into a Drug Factory: Falling launch costs and increasingly sophisticated orbital laboratories are reviving hopes that microgravity could become a practical manufacturing tool for medicine. Companies such as Varda Space Industries are already processing pharmaceuticals in autonomous capsules, exploiting weightlessness to produce drug crystals that can be purer, more uniform, or otherwise difficult to create on Earth. Researchers are also testing artificial retinas, stem cells, organoids, and cancer models, with some experiments showing more uniform tissue growth and accelerated biological processes in orbit. The biggest obstacle remains economics: launching and returning materials is still expensive, and commercial space stations may struggle without government support. But robotic capsules and automation could eventually make orbital biomanufacturing routine rather than exceptional. (Science)
Autism Mutations Converge on Shared Protein Networks: A large molecular map of autism-associated proteins suggests that many genetically distinct forms of autism disrupt overlapping biological machinery. Researchers systematically mapped interactions involving proteins encoded by 100 high-confidence autism-risk genes, identifying more than 1,800 protein interactions—87 percent previously unreported. They then examined 54 patient-derived mutations and found that apparently different genetic variants often altered the same protein complexes and cellular pathways involved in brain development. The convergence could have therapeutic implications: rather than designing a separate treatment for every autism-associated mutation, researchers may eventually be able to target shared molecular pathways affecting multiple genetic subtypes. The Science study does not establish treatments, but it provides an unusually detailed bridge connecting autism genetics with proteins, cellular mechanisms and potentially druggable biological processes. (Science)
Brain Circuit Reveals How Hibernation Begins: Researchers have identified a key brain circuit controlling hibernation, helping explain how mammals deliberately shut down much of their metabolism for extended periods. The work traces neural activity involved in initiating torpor, the profound physiological state in which body temperature, heart rate and energy consumption fall dramatically. Understanding this system has implications beyond animal biology. Researchers have long wondered whether aspects of hibernation could eventually be induced therapeutically in humans, potentially protecting organs after severe injury, reducing metabolic demands during surgery or even helping astronauts tolerate long-duration space travel. The discovery does not mean human hibernation is imminent: mammalian species vary enormously in their ability to enter torpor. But locating circuitry capable of orchestrating such sweeping physiological changes provides scientists with a concrete biological mechanism to investigate. (Science)
Climate Change Is Strengthening El Niño: Fossilized corals from the Galápagos Islands provide some of the clearest physical evidence yet that human-caused climate change is intensifying El Niño. Coral skeletons preserve chemical records of past ocean temperatures, allowing researchers to reconstruct variations in the tropical Pacific extending into the preindustrial era. The records show that El Niño events during recent decades have been stronger than those during the twentieth century—and substantially stronger than events before widespread fossil-fuel burning began in the nineteenth century. The mechanism may involve increasingly warm, stratified surface waters that respond more dramatically when Pacific trade winds weaken. The finding is particularly significant because El Niño reshapes weather worldwide, influencing drought, wildfire, flooding and agriculture. The current event could become the strongest observed in living memory. (Scientific American)
AI Learns to Design Complex RNA Structures: Generative AI has successfully designed intricate RNA structures that fold into experimentally verified three-dimensional forms, potentially expanding scientists’ ability to engineer biological molecules. Researchers organized an Eterna competition involving 57 RNA pseudoknots—structures in which RNA strands fold into complex interlocking configurations. AI systems matched experienced human designers on most blind challenges. Chemical mapping, compensatory mutagenesis and cryogenic electron microscopy then confirmed that several AI-designed molecules folded as intended. Remarkably, some generated stable three-dimensional structures using tertiary interactions that the models had not explicitly been designed to predict. A foundation model called RNet, trained using previous RNA chemical-mapping data, helped guide the process. The results suggest researchers may be able to design sophisticated functional RNAs without first solving the notoriously difficult problem of predicting every detail of RNA’s three-dimensional structure. (Science)
Cacao Reached Georgia a Thousand Years Ago: Ancient DNA recovered from pottery at the Indigenous city of Etowah in present-day Georgia provides the first clear evidence that cacao reached the Mississippian world roughly 1,000 years ago. Researchers examined 800- to 900-year-old pottery fragments recovered from feasting deposits associated with construction of Etowah’s first platform mound. Earlier chemical analyses had detected caffeine, but that could have come from native yaupon holly. DNA sequencing instead identified fragments matching Theobroma cacao, the tropical plant from which chocolate is made. Because cacao cannot grow anywhere near Georgia, it must have arrived through long-distance exchange networks extending toward cacao-producing regions farther south. The discovery substantially expands the known geographic reach of pre-Columbian cacao and highlights the scale of trade connecting Indigenous societies across North America before European colonization. (Phys.org)
New Chip Attack Slips Through Spectre Defenses: Computer processors contain a fleeting security vulnerability that attackers can exploit even after defenses against speculative-execution attacks have been activated. Researchers at Massachusetts Institute of Technology developed an attack called TONTOU that targets the tiny interval between clearing a processor’s branch-prediction machinery and actually using it. By precisely timing routine hardware interrupts, attackers can contaminate that machinery during windows only a few instructions—and sometimes tens of nanoseconds—wide. Tests against multiple generations of Intel and AMD processors produced successful mispredictions. On a Linux system, researchers ultimately bypassed memory protections and copied the /etc/shadow password file in half their attempts. AMD has released a mitigation after researchers disclosed the vulnerability. The work shows that timing gaps can undermine security measures that appear logically sound when considered only as sequences of instructions. (MIT News)
Scientists Observe Optical Magnus Effect: Physicists have experimentally observed the optical Magnus effect for the first time, revealing a subtle displacement in how tightly focused laser light interacts with individual atoms. Researchers trapped a single calcium ion and moved it through a focused laser beam, expecting maximum interaction at the beam’s intensity peak. Instead, electromagnetic structure within the focused light shifted the strongest interaction sideways by several hundred nanometers—an optical analogue of the Magnus effect that curves spinning balls through the air. Surprisingly, the displacement depended only on the light’s wavelength, not how tightly the laser was focused. The effect could matter for trapped-ion quantum computers, where lasers must manipulate individual qubits with extraordinary precision. Unaccounted-for shifts could introduce errors, while deliberately exploiting the associated forces might provide new ways of coupling qubits for more complex quantum operations. (Phys.org)
Gecko Genomes Reveal Rules Behind Sex Chromosomes: Whether animals evolve XY or ZW sex chromosomes may not be evolutionary chance. Researchers compared chromosome-level genomes from 19 gecko species and found that their sex chromosomes arose independently from 16 different ancestral chromosomes. Yet the transitions followed patterns. Five of 11 origins that could be dated clustered around the Middle Miocene Climatic Transition roughly 10 million years ago, suggesting environmental change may have helped push species from temperature-dependent sex determination toward genetic systems. The genes already present on ancestral chromosomes also appeared to influence whether an XY or ZW arrangement emerged. Researchers propose a four-stage process involving climatic disruption, genomic predisposition, suppression of recombination and eventual dosage compensation. The results suggest the extraordinary diversity of vertebrate sex-determination systems may be shaped by predictable interactions between genomes, environmental conditions and natural selection. (EurekAlert!)
Roman Telescope Prepares to Transform Astronomy: Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope is scheduled to launch August 30 aboard a Falcon Heavy, beginning a mission designed to survey the cosmos on a scale impossible for Hubble or Webb. Roman’s Wide Field Instrument will combine Hubble-like resolution with a field of view roughly 100 times larger, enabling enormous surveys of galaxies, dark matter, dark energy and exoplanets. Its experimental Coronagraph Instrument will also test technologies for directly imaging planets beside overwhelmingly brighter stars. The instrument is expected to suppress starlight sufficiently to examine gas giants substantially fainter and closer to their host stars than current systems allow. Roman will travel to the Sun-Earth L2 point about 1.5 million kilometers from Earth, joining Webb in one of astronomy’s most valuable observing locations. (Max Planck Institute for Astronomy)
Two Extinct Galápagos Tortoise Lineages Discovered: Genetic information once considered too degraded to analyze has revealed two previously unknown extinct lineages of Galápagos giant tortoises. Researchers at Yale University combined computational genomic techniques to recover evolutionary information from historical museum specimens whose DNA had deteriorated extensively. The analysis showed that some specimens belonged to distinct ancient populations rather than known tortoise lineages, expanding scientists’ picture of the archipelago’s lost biodiversity. Giant tortoises evolved separately across different Galápagos islands, producing a remarkable natural experiment in adaptation before hunting, habitat disruption and introduced species drove several populations extinct. Beyond tortoise evolution, the research demonstrates that museum collections may contain far more usable genomic information than previously recognized. New computational methods could therefore resurrect genetic histories from thousands of old specimens previously dismissed as molecularly unusable. (Phys.org)