In recent years, illicit drugs in the US have been cut with some high-profile and dangerous adulterants, such as the powerful veterinary sedative xylazine (aka tranq) and the yet more powerful veterinary sedative medetomidine. But last year, a new adulterant hit the streets. Unlike its predecessors, it didn't show up here and there and gain ground gradually; it seemed to show up everywhere at once and quickly overtook the market. Even more oddly, it's not a type of chemical one might expect in illicit drugs. It's not another sedative. In fact, it has no known psychoactive effects at all.

The chemical is bis(2,2,6,6-tetramethyl-4-piperidyl) sebacate, also called BTMPS, which is in a group of chemicals called hindered amine light stabilizers. BTMPS is usually added to plastics, coatings, and adhesives to protect them from weathering and UV radiation.

Researchers don't know why it's being added to illicit drugs—or what it does once it's there. BTMPS has never been tested in humans before given that it's never been intended for use in humans.

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James McCully was in the lab extracting tiny structures called mitochondria from cells when researchers on his team rushed in. They’d been operating on a pig heart and couldn’t get it pumping normally again.

McCully studies heart damage prevention at Boston Children’s Hospital and Harvard Medical School and was keenly interested in mitochondria . These power-producing organelles are particularly important for organs like the heart that have high energy needs. McCully had been wondering whether transplanting healthy mitochondria into injured hearts might help restore their function.

The pig’s heart was graying rapidly, so McCully decided to try it. He loaded a syringe with the extracted mitochondria and injected them directly into the heart. Before his eyes, it began beating normally, returning to its rosy hue.

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Six weeks after he terminated the nomination of Jared Isaacman to become NASA Administrator, President Trump moved on Wednesday evening to install a new temporary leader for the space agency.

The newly named interim administrator, Sean Duffy, already has a full portfolio: He is serving as the Secretary of Transportation, a Cabinet-level position that oversees 55,000 employees at thirteen agencies, including the Federal Aviation Administration.

"Sean is doing a TREMENDOUS job in handling our Country's Transportation Affairs, including creating a state-of-the-art Air Traffic Control systems, while at the same time rebuilding our roads and bridges, making them efficient, and beautiful, again," Trump wrote on his social media network Wednesday evening. "He will be a fantastic leader of the ever more important Space Agency, even if only for a short period of time."

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On Monday, sheet music platform Soundslice says it developed a new feature after discovering that ChatGPT was incorrectly telling users the service could import ASCII tablature —a text-based guitar notation format the company had never supported. The incident reportedly marks what might be the first case of a business building functionality in direct response to an AI model's confabulation.

Typically, Soundslice digitizes sheet music from photos or PDFs and syncs the notation with audio or video recordings, allowing musicians to see the music scroll by as they hear it played. The platform also includes tools for slowing down playback and practicing difficult passages.

Adrian Holovaty, co-founder of Soundslice , wrote in a recent blog post that the recent feature development process began as a complete mystery. A few months ago, Holovaty began noticing unusual activity in the company's error logs. Instead of typical sheet music uploads, users were submitting screenshots of ChatGPT conversations containing ASCII tablature—simple text representations of guitar music that look like strings with numbers indicating fret positions.

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After Cloudflare started testing new features that would allow websites to block AI crawlers or require payment for scraping , the tech company immediately faced questions over the logistics of the plan.

In particular, website owners and SEO experts wanted to know how Cloudflare planned to block Google's bot from scraping sites to fuel AI overviews without risking blocking the same bot from crawling for valuable search engine placements.

Last week, a travel blogger raised questions about the blocking and so-called pay-per-crawl features pushed Cloudflare CEO Matthew Prince to respond on X (formerly Twitter).

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Apple hasn't iterated on its Vision Pro hardware since launching it in early 2024 for $3,499, opting instead to refine the headset with a steady stream of software updates. But Bloomberg's Mark Gurman reports that a new version of the Vision Pro could arrive "as early as this year," with a replacement for the 3-year-old Apple M2 chip and a more comfortable strap.

Gurman says that the updated Vision Pro would ship with Apple's M4 processor, which launched in the iPad Pro last year and has since found its way into new MacBook Pros, MacBook Airs , a new iMac, and a redesigned Mac mini .

Our tests in Apple's other devices (and publicly available benchmark databases like Geekbench's ) show the M4 offering roughly 50 percent better multicore CPU performance and 20 or 25 percent better graphics performance than the M2, respectable increases for a device like the Vision Pro that needs to draw high-resolution images with as little latency as possible. Improvements to the chip's video encoding and decoding hardware and image signal processor should also provide small-but-noticeable improvements to the headset's passthrough video feed.

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Extensions installed on almost 1 million devices have been overriding key security protections to turn browsers into engines that scrape websites on behalf of a paid service, a researcher said.

The 245 extensions, available for Chrome, Firefox, and Edge, have racked up nearly 909,000 downloads, John Tuckner of SecurityAnnex reported . The extensions serve a wide range of purposes, including managing bookmarks and clipboards, boosting speaker volumes, and generating random numbers. The common thread among all of them: They incorporate MellowTel-js , an open source JavaScript library that allows developers to monetize their extensions.

Intentional weakening of browsing protections

Tuckner and critics say the monetization works by using the browser extensions to scrape websites on behalf of paying customers, which include advertisers. Tuckner reached this conclusion after uncovering close ties between MellowTel and Olostep , a company that bills itself as "the world's most reliable and cost-effective Web scraping API." Olostep says its service “avoids all bot detection and can parallelize up to 100K requests in minutes.” Paying customers submit the locations of browsers they want to access specific webpages. Olostep then uses its installed base of extension users to fulfill the request.

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Washington, DC— From a distance, the gathering looked like a standard poster session at an academic conference, with researchers standing next to large displays of the work they were doing. Except in this case, it was taking place in the Rayburn House Office Building on Capitol Hill, and the researchers were describing work that they weren’t doing. Called "The things we’ll never know," the event was meant to highlight the work of researchers whose grants had been canceled by the Trump administration.

A lot of court cases have been dealing with these cancellations as a group, highlighting the lack of scientific—or seemingly rational —input into the decisions to cut funding for entire categories of research. Here, there was a much tighter focus on the individual pieces of research that had become casualties in that larger fight.

Seeing even a small sampling of the individual grants that have been terminated provides a much better perspective on the sort of damage that is being done to the US public by these cuts and the utter mindlessness of the process that's causing that damage.

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With Verizon seeking permission to lock phones to its network for six months or longer instead of the current 60 days, a coalition of advocacy groups yesterday urged the Federal Communications Commission to reject the cellular carrier's petition.

"Phone locking distorts market competition, raises switching costs, and contributes to unnecessary e-waste," the groups said in a filing . "It impedes consumers' ability to take full advantage of the devices they already own, forces them to purchase new phones unnecessarily, and reduces their freedom to choose more affordable or higher-quality service options. It undermines price discipline among carriers, makes it harder for smaller and prepaid-focused providers to compete, and reduces the availability of high-quality used devices on the secondary market."

The FCC filing was submitted by Public Knowledge, the Benton Foundation, the Canadian Repair Coalition, Consumer Reports, the Electronic Frontier Foundation, Fight for the Future, iFixit, the Fulu Foundation, the Open Technology Institute at New America, law professor Aaron Perzanowski, Repair.org, and the Software Freedom Conservancy.

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