The Wheel of Time, Reacher, and Fallout are just a few of the shows you should be watching on Amazon Prime Video this week.

A number of fires broke out in the Southeastern US last week. Hurricane-downed trees may have helped fuel the flames, experts say.

Plus: A nominee to lead CISA emerges, Elon Musk visits the NSA, a renowned crypto cracking firm’s secret (and problematic) cofounder is revealed, and more.

Bloomberg: China’s National People’s Congress saw an uncharacteristic surge in tech optimism, driven by DeepSeek, which has fired up investors, politicians, and regulators  —  – Push for high-tech development follows DeepSeek’s breakthrough  — Chinese shares poised to post best NPC performance since 2018

Steven Levy / Wired: Meta’s effort to neutralize Sarah Wynn-Williams’ book, filled with gossipy anecdotes, feels less about defending its reputation than a need to punish a defector  —  Mark Zuckerberg might be in his post-fact-checking-era.  But that hasn’t stopped Meta from going after the author of Careless People.

Sherry Qin / Wall Street Journal: Foxconn says revenue from cloud and networking, including AI servers, made up 26% of its Q4 revenue and will almost catch up with consumer electronics in 2025  —  The Taiwanese company now plays an increasingly important role in building AI servers for U.S. tech giants such as Amazon and […]

A directive from the National Institute of Standards and Technology eliminates mention of “AI safety” and “AI fairness.”

Amid deteriorating relations between the US and Canada, many Canadian video game developers are opting not to travel to San Francisco for next week’s Game Developers Conference.

For $10,000, you get a small, warm room with a sound system and party lights!

Jessica Toonkel / Wall Street Journal: Streamers court YouTubers for new shows or spinoffs; sources: Amazon made $100M+ in profit on Beast Games and Netflix held talks with Dude Perfect for a series  —  As ‘Beast Games’ boasts profit and gears up for more seasons, streamers search for similar success  —  YouTube creators are beginning […]

Scharon Harding / Ars Technica: Email: Amazon says Echo users won’t be able to set their devices to process Alexa requests locally, as new generative AI features need processing in the cloud  —  In an email sent to customers today, Amazon said that Echo users will no longer be able to set their devices to […]

Bloomberg: Sources: Ubisoft explores selling a stake in a new entity holding IP like Assassin’s Creed to investors including Tencent, at a higher valuation than Ubisoft  —  – Tencent among firms invited to bid for stake in new entity  — Unit to hold some core Ubisoft IP, including Assassin’s Creed

New Scientist’s revelation that a UK minister is asking ChatGPT for advice raises the question of what role these new AI tools should play in government – and whether we should really think of them as intelligent

A decade after scientists in The Picower Institute for Learning and Memory at MIT first began testing whether sensory stimulation of the brain’s 40Hz “gamma” frequency rhythms could treat Alzheimer’s disease in mice, a growing evidence base supporting the idea that it can improve brain health — in humans as well as animals — has […]

The case for thumbs up/thumbs down instead of five stars.

How to prioritize their well-being, reallocate their workload, and offer ongoing support.

Risks are up, visibility is down, but don’t count the U.S. economy out quite yet.

Stay toasty warm with our favorite electric heated blankets.

Pi is an irrational number, and like some irrational people it just goes on and on. What is it with this crazy, crucial number?

Is work religion, or is religion work? Both.

Politico: European authorities raided 21 addresses, arrested several people, and sealed two offices in the EU Parliament, as part of a spiraling bribery probe into Huawei  —  Chinese tech giant’s offices raided and Parliament offices sealed in case that echoes the 2022 Qatargate investigation.

Kathrin Hille / Financial Times: Foxconn CEO Young Liu says “the attitude and the approach” of the US government toward tariffs has become a “big headache” for companies like Apple and Amazon  —  World’s biggest contract electronics manufacturer highlights disruption caused by trade policy to groups including Apple and Amazon

Jess Weatherbed / The Verge: The GSMA announces the new RCS standard supports interoperable E2EE between platforms; Apple says it will add support for the standard in a future update  —  ’We will add support for end-to-end encrypted RCS messages to iOS, iPadOS, macOS, and watchOS in future software updates.’

It is a deep question, from deep in our history: When did human language as we know it emerge? A new survey of genomic evidence suggests our unique language capacity was present at least 135,000 years ago. Subsequently, language might have entered social use 100,000 years ago. Our species, Homo sapiens, is about 230,000 years […]

The team working at the Social Security Administration appears to be among the largest DOGE units deployed to any government agency.

The Gorge, Fly Me to the Moon, and Blitz are just a few of the movies you should be watching on Apple TV+ this month.

Musk’s loyalists at DOGE have infiltrated dozens of federal agencies, pushed out tens of thousands of workers, and siphoned millions of people’s most sensitive data. The next step: Unleash the AI.

Julie Bort / TechCrunch: Flock Safety, maker of computer vision-enabled video surveillance tech for police and businesses, raised $275M at a $7.5B valuation, up from $4.8B a year ago  —  Flock Safety and one of its long-time VCs, Bedrock Capital, announced Thursday that the startup raised a fresh $275 million at a $7.5 billion valuation.

Kyle Wiggers / TechCrunch: OpenAI calls DeepSeek “state-controlled” and recommends that the US consider banning “PRC-produced” models that “violate user privacy and create security risks”  —  In a new policy proposal, OpenAI describes Chinese AI lab DeepSeek as “state-subsidized” …

Mark Gurman / Bloomberg: Sources: Apple is planning a new AirPods feature as part of iOS 19 that will enable live-translation of in-person conversations  —  Apple Inc. is planning a new AirPods feature that allows the earbuds to live-translate an in-person conversation into another language, according to people with knowledge of the matter.

New Scientist has used freedom of information laws to obtain the ChatGPT records of Peter Kyle, the UK’s technology secretary, in what is believed to be a world-first use of such legislation

More than 60,000 tons of plastic makes the journey down the Amazon River to the Atlantic Ocean every year. And that doesn’t include what finds its way to the river’s banks, or the microplastics ingested by the region’s abundant and diverse wildlife. It’s easy to demonize plastic, but it has been crucial in developing the society […]

Many companies invest heavily in hiring talent to create the high-performance library code that underpins modern artificial intelligence systems. NVIDIA, for instance, developed some of the most advanced high-performance computing (HPC) libraries, creating a competitive moat that has proven difficult for others to breach. But what if a couple of students, within a few months, […]

Converting one type of cell to another — for example, a skin cell to a neuron — can be done through a process that requires the skin cell to be induced into a “pluripotent” stem cell, then differentiated into a neuron. Researchers at MIT have now devised a simplified process that bypasses the stem cell […]

Strategies to help you pull them back into the conversation—and keep them there.

How to succeed when disruption is the only constant.

A space heater designed for babies offers a real solution to the no good, very bad thermostats on most portable heaters.

Have sweeter dreams with these deals to celebrate National Sleep Awareness Month.

Employees at the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency tell WIRED they’re struggling to protect the US while the administration dismisses their colleagues and poisons their partnerships.

Globes Online: Tel Aviv-based Bria, which licenses images from 30+ partners like Getty to train AI, raised a $40M Series B led by Red Dot, taking its total funding to $65M  —  Bria’s Visual Generative AI platform empowers businesses to create predictable, controllable, and on-brand content that aligns with their visual language.

Ivan Mehta / TechCrunch: Xiaomi plans to preinstall PhonePe’s Indus Appstore on all new smartphones sold in India and replace its GetApps app store with Indus Appstore on existing ones  —  Chinese smartphone maker Xiaomi said on Thursday that its Android smartphones sold in India will come preinstalled with Indian fintech company PhonePe’s app store.

Eric Geller / Wired: Interviews with seven CISA employees describe how mass layoffs and weak leadership are taking a severe toll on the US government’s cyber defense agency  —  Employees at the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency tell WIRED they’re struggling to protect the US while the administration dismisses …

Whether social media sites police their platforms using humans or algorithms, content moderation isn’t keeping users safe, says Jess Brough

Sports analytics is fueled by fans, and funded by teams. The 19th annual MIT Sloan Sports Analytics Conference (SSAC), held last Friday and Saturday, showed more clearly than ever how both groups can join forces. After all, for decades, the industry’s main energy source has been fans weary of bad strategies: too much bunting in […]

In 2022, Randall Pietersen, a civil engineer in the U.S. Air Force, set out on a training mission to assess damage at an airfield runway, practicing “base recovery” protocol after a simulated attack. For hours, his team walked over the area in chemical protection gear, radioing in geocoordinates as they documented damage and looked for […]

Three outstanding educators have been named MacVicar Faculty Fellows: associate professor in comparative media studies/writing Paloma Duong, associate professor of economics Frank Schilbach, and associate professor of urban studies and planning Justin Steil. For more than 30 years, the MacVicar Faculty Fellows Program has recognized exemplary and sustained contributions to undergraduate education at MIT. The program is named […]

On this special episode of Uncanny Valley, we unpack Elon Musk’s desire for a government shutdown that could become permanent. Plus: An update on measles misinformation in the US.

The best end-to-end encrypted messaging app has a host of security features. Here are the ones you should care about.

“No Lives Matter” has emerged in recent months as a particularly violent splinter group within the extremist crime network known as Com and 764, and experts are at a loss for how to stop its spread.

Lauren Feiner / The Verge: Google calls the passage of Utah’s app store age-verification bill “concerning” and part of an effort by Meta and others to “offload” kids’ safety to app stores  —  Google has its own ideas about what kids online safety legislation should look like.