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The US and UK have signed a landmark agreement on artificial intelligence, as the allies become the first countries to formally cooperate on how to test and assess risks from emerging AI models.

The agreement, signed on Monday in Washington by UK Science Minister Michelle Donelan and US Commerce Secretary Gina Raimondo, lays out how the two governments will pool technical knowledge, information, and talent on AI safety.

The deal represents the first bilateral arrangement on AI safety in the world and comes as governments push for greater regulation of the existential risks from new technology, such as its use in damaging cyber attacks or designing bioweapons.

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Researchers have unearthed never-before-seen wiper malware tied to the Kremlin and an operation two years ago that took out more than 10,000 satellite modems located mainly in Ukraine on the eve of Russia’s invasion of its neighboring country.

AcidPour, as researchers from security firm Sentinel One have named the new malware, has stark similarities to AcidRain, a wiper discovered in March 2022 that Viasat has confirmed was used in the attack on its modems earlier that month. Wipers are malicious applications designed to destroy stored data or render devices inoperable. Viasat said AcidRain was installed on more than 10,000 Eutelsat KA-SAT modems used by the broadband provider seven days prior to the March 2022 discovery of the wiper. AcidRain was installed on the devices after attackers gained access to the company’s private network.

Sentinel One, which also discovered AcidRain, said at the time that the earlier wiper had enough technical overlaps with malware the US government attributed to the Russian government in 2018 to make it likely that AcidRain and the 2018 malware, known as VPNFilter, were closely linked to the same team of developers. In turn, Sentinel One’s report Thursday noting the similarities between AcidRain and AcidPour provides evidence that AcidPour was also created by developers working on behalf of the Kremlin.

Enlarge / The United Nations building in New York. (credit: Getty Images)

On Thursday, the United Nations General Assembly unanimously consented to adopt what some call the first global resolution on AI, reports Reuters. The resolution aims to foster the protection of personal data, enhance privacy policies, ensure close monitoring of AI for potential risks, and uphold human rights. It emerged from a proposal by the United States and received backing from China and 121 other countries.

Being a nonbinding agreement and thus effectively toothless, the resolution seems broadly popular in the AI industry. On X, Microsoft Vice Chair and President Brad Smith wrote, "We fully support the @UN's adoption of the comprehensive AI resolution. The consensus reached today marks a critical step towards establishing international guardrails for the ethical and sustainable development of AI, ensuring this technology serves the needs of everyone."

The resolution, titled "Seizing the opportunities of safe, secure and trustworthy artificial intelligence systems for sustainable development," resulted from three months of negotiation, and the stakeholders involved seem pleased at the level of international cooperation. "We're sailing in choppy waters with the fast-changing technology, which means that it's more important than ever to steer by the light of our values," one senior US administration official told Reuters, highlighting the significance of this "first-ever truly global consensus document on AI."

Enlarge / A mother with her twin 6-year-old boys who have metachromatic leukodystrophy, a genetic disease that leaves them unable to move. Photo taken on September 3, 2004. (credit: Getty | John Ewing/Portland Press Herald)

In a medical triumph, the US Food and Drug Administration on Monday approved a gene therapy that appears to trounce a rare, tragic disease that progressively steals children's ability to talk, move, and think, leading to a vegetative state and death. For those who begin to slip away in infancy, many die by age 5. But, with the new therapy, 37 children in an initial trial were all still alive at age 6. Most could still talk, walk on their own, and perform normally on IQ tests, which was unseen in untreated children. Some of the earliest children treated have now been followed for up to 12 years—and they continue to do well.

But, the triumph turned bittersweet today, Wednesday, as the company behind the therapy, Lenmeldy, set the price for the US market at $4.25 million, making it the most expensive drug in the world. The price is $310,000 higher than what experts calculated to be the maximum fair price for the lifesaving drug; the nonprofit Institute for Clinical and Economic Review, or ICER, gave a range last October of between $2.29 million to $3.94 million.

The price raises questions about whether state, federal, and private health insurance plans will be able to shoulder the costs. "Unless states have allocated appropriately for it, and looked at the drug pipeline, they may not be prepared for what could be significant cost spikes," Edwin Park, a research professor at the McCourt School of Public Health at Georgetown University, told CNN.

Enlarge / Dr. Craig Wright arrives at the Rolls Building, part of the Royal Courts of Justice, on February 06, 2024, in London, England. (credit: Dan Kitwood / Staff | Getty Images News)

"Overwhelming evidence" shows that Australian computer scientist Craig Wright is not bitcoin creator Satoshi Nakamoto, a UK judge declared Thursday.

In what Wired described as a "surprise ruling" at the closing of Wright's six-week trial, Justice James Mellor abruptly ended years of speculation by saying:

Dr. Wright is not the author of the Bitcoin white paper. Dr. Wright is not the person that operated under the pseudonym Satoshi Nakamoto. Dr. Wright is not the person that created the Bitcoin system. Nor is Dr. Wright the author of the Bitcoin software.

Wright was not in the courtroom for this explosive moment, Wired reported.

Enlarge / A Starlink terminal used by the Ukraine army for drone operations in May 2023. (credit: Getty Images | Pacific Press )

Democratic lawmakers are probing SpaceX over Russia's reported use of Starlink in Ukraine, saying that recent developments raise questions about SpaceX's "compliance with US sanctions and export controls."

SpaceX CEO Elon Musk last month denied what he called "false news reports [that] claim that SpaceX is selling Starlink terminals to Russia," saying that, "to the best of our knowledge, no Starlinks have been sold directly or indirectly to Russia." But Musk's statement didn't satisfy US Reps. Jamie Raskin (D-Md.) and Robert Garcia (D-Calif.), who sent a letter to SpaceX President Gwynne Shotwell yesterday.

"Starlink is an invaluable resource for Ukrainians in their fight against Russia's brutal and illegitimate invasion. It is alarming that Russia may be obtaining and using your technology to coordinate attacks against Ukrainian troops in illegally occupied regions in Eastern and Southern Ukraine, potentially in violation of US sanctions and export controls," Raskin and Garcia wrote.

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A core developer of Nginx, currently the world's most popular web server, has quit the project, stating that he no longer sees it as "a free and open source project… for the public good." His fork, freenginx, is "going to be run by developers, and not corporate entities," writes Maxim Dounin, and will be "free from arbitrary corporate actions."

Dounin is one of the earliest and still most active coders on the open source Nginx project and one of the first employees of Nginx, Inc., a company created in 2011 to commercially support the steadily growing web server. Nginx is now used on roughly one-third of the world's web servers, ahead of Apache.

A tricky history of creation and ownership

Nginx Inc. was acquired by Seattle-based networking firm F5 in 2019. Later that year, two of Nginx's leaders, Maxim Konovalov and Igor Sysoev, were detained and interrogated in their homes by armed Russian state agents. Sysoev's former employer, Internet firm Rambler, claimed that it owned the rights to Nginx's source code, as it was developed during Sysoev's tenure at Rambler (where Dounin also worked). While the criminal charges and rights do not appear to have materialized, the implications of a Russian company's intrusion into a popular open source piece of the web's infrastructure caused some alarm.

Enlarge / Ukraine’s GUR military intelligence unit made its claim following multiple reports in recent days that Russian forces are using Starlink’s distinctive square-shaped terminals. (credit: Pierre Crom/Getty Images)

Russian forces are using Starlink terminals on the front line in Ukraine, according to the Ukrainian military, which said the adoption of Elon Musk’s satellite Internet service by Moscow’s troops was becoming “systemic.”

Ukraine’s GUR military intelligence unit said on Telegram on Sunday that radio intercepts confirmed the use of Starlink terminals by Russian units operating in the occupied Donetsk region of eastern Ukraine.

“Yes, there have been recorded cases of the Russian occupiers using these devices,” Andriy Yusov, a GUR officer, told RBC-Ukraine. “This is starting to take on a systemic nature.”

Enlarge / The Golgi apparatus, shown here in light green, may have been involved in building internal structures in cells. (credit: ARTUR PLAWGO / SCIENCE PHOTO LIBRARY)

Before Neanderthals and Denisovans, before vaguely humanoid primates, proto-mammals, or fish that crawled out of the ocean to become the first terrestrial animals, our earliest ancestors were microbes.

More complex organisms like ourselves descend from eukaryotes, which have a nuclear membrane around their DNA (as opposed to prokaryotes, which don’t). Eukaryotes were thought to have evolved a few billion years ago, during the late Palaeoproterozoic period, and started diversifying by around 800 million years ago. Their diversification was not well understood. Now, a team of researchers led by UC Santa Barbara paleontologist Leigh Ann Riedman discovered eukaryote microfossils that are 1.64 billion years old, yet had already diversified and had surprisingly sophisticated features.

“High levels of eukaryotic species richness and morphological disparity suggest that although late Palaeoproterozoic [fossils] preserve our oldest record of eukaryotes, the eukaryotic clade has a much deeper history,” Riedman and her team said in a study recently published in Papers in Paleontology.