American inspections of foreign food facilities—which produce everything from crawfish to cookies for the US market—have plummeted to historic lows this year, a ProPublica analysis of federal data shows, even as inspections reveal alarming conditions at some manufacturers.

About two dozen current and former Food and Drug Administration officials blame the pullback on deep staffing cuts under the Trump administration. The stark reduction marks a dramatic shift in oversight at a time when the United States has never been more dependent on foreign food, which accounts for the vast majority of the nation’s seafood and more than half its fresh fruit.

The stakes are high: Foreign products have been increasingly linked to outbreaks of foodborne illness. In recent years, FDA investigators have uncovered disturbing lapses in facilities producing food bound for American supermarkets. In Indonesia, cookie factory workers hauled dough in soiled buckets. In China, seafood processors slid crawfish along cracked, stained conveyor belts. Investigators have reported crawling insects, dripping pipes and fake testing data purporting to show food products were pathogen free.

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One of Russia’s most important projects over the last 15 years has been the construction of the Vostochny spaceport as the country seeks to fly its rockets from native soil and modernize its launch operations.

However, the initiative has been a fiasco from the start. After construction began in 2011, the project was beset by hunger strikes, claims of unpaid workers, and the theft of $126 million. Additionally, a man driving a diamond-encrusted Mercedes was arrested after embezzling $75,000. Five years ago, there was another purge of top officials after another round of corruption.

Through it all, there has been some progress. In 2016, a Soyuz-2 rocket launched from the first pad, “1S.” And eight years later, a second pad, “1A,” opened with a successful Angara rocket launch. Eventually, the Russian space corporation, Roscosmos, would like to operate seven launch pads at the Vostochny in the far eastern area of Russia, so development work continues.

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Star Trek fans who have long envied the Star Wars franchise’s collaboration with Lego are finally getting something to celebrate: Lego is introducing a version of Star Trek’s USS Enterprise , specifically the Enterprise-D from Star Trek: The Next Generation .

Because we don’t live in the post-money utopian society of the 24th century, the kit will cost you, and unfortunately, it’s priced well into the for-superfans-only zone. The 3,600-piece starship and collection of minifigs will run you $400 when the set officially leaves spacedock on November 28.

Though the Enterprise-D is far from our favorite Enterprise , it does make sense as a starting point for the Lego Group. The Next Generation ‘s seven-year run in the late ’80s and early ’90s represents a creative and cultural peak for the franchise, and a 2010s-era remaster that painstakingly re-scanned and upgraded all of the original footage and effects for high-definition TVs has kept the old episodes looking fresher than other ’90s Trek shows like Deep Space Nine and Voyager.

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On Wednesday, Reuters reported that Google is planning to build a large AI data center on Christmas Island , a 52-square-mile Australian territory in the Indian Ocean, following a cloud computing deal with Australia’s military. The previously undisclosed project will reportedly position advanced AI infrastructure a mere 220 miles south of Indonesia at a location military strategists consider critical for monitoring Chinese naval activity.

Aside from its strategic military position, the island is famous for its massive annual crab migration , where over 100 million of red crabs make their way across the island to spawn in the ocean. That’s notable because the tech giant has applied for environmental approvals to build a subsea cable connecting the 135-square-kilometer island to Darwin , where US Marines are stationed for six months each year.

The project follows a three-year cloud agreement Google signed with Australia’s military in July 2025, but many details about the new facility’s size, cost, and specific capabilities remain “secret,” according to Reuters. Both Google and Australia’s Department of Defense declined to comment when contacted by the news agency.

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The University of Pennsylvania has a somewhat unusual distinction: It is the alma mater of two of the planet’s most polarizing figures , Elon Musk and Donald Trump. As the political power of both men rose over the last year, the US government began to pressure Penn, first by pulling its research funding and then by targeting the school for past actions related to a transgender swimmer.

After the “sticks” were deployed, a “carrot” was offered. Penn became one of just nine schools nationally to be offered a special “compact” with the federal government, which would give the feds broad control over the school and its speech in return for preferential access to federal funds. Penn declined to sign the deal . (Making the whole surreal situation stranger was the fact that one of Penn’s own wealthy boosters apparently helped the Trump administration write the compact .)

In other words, Penn has become an obvious target of the Trump administration; now it has been targeted by a hacker claiming to share Trump and Musk’s grievances over affirmative action and “wokeness.”

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Syphilis can be a tricky disease to diagnose—especially when a patient may not be sharing the whole story.

Doctors in Belgium met with a real head-scratcher when an 83-year-old married man came in with a rare form of secondary syphilis—the second of four stages of the sexually transmitted bacterial infection that has been called a “master of disguise.”

The man told doctors up front that he was in a monogamous 50-year-long marriage and had been sexually inactive in recent years following treatment for cancer. In a Clinical Problem-Solving report published today in the New England Journal of Medicine, doctors laid out the step-by-step tests and reasoning they used to get to the right diagnosis, which still didn’t answer all their questions.

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Google on Wednesday revealed five recent malware samples that were built using generative AI. The end results of each one were far below par with professional malware development, a finding that shows that vibe coding of malicious wares lags behind more traditional forms of development, which means it still has a long way to go before it poses a real-world threat.

One of the samples, for instance, tracked under the name PromptLock, was part of an academic study analyzing how effective the use of large language models can be “to autonomously plan, adapt, and execute the ransomware attack lifecycle.” The researchers, however, reported the malware had “clear limitations: it omits persistence, lateral movement, and advanced evasion tactics” and served as little more than a demonstration of the feasibility of AI for such purposes. Prior to the paper’s release, security firm ESET said it had discovered the sample and hailed it as “the first AI-powered ransomware.”

Don’t believe the hype

Like the other four samples Google analyzed—FruitShell, PromptFlux, PromptSteal, and QuietVault—PromptLock was easy to detect, even by less-sophisticated endpoint protections that rely on static signatures. All samples also employed previously seen methods in malware samples, making them easy to counteract. They also had no operational impact, meaning they didn’t require defenders to adopt new defenses.

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Civil and digital rights experts are horrified by a proposed rule change that would allow the Department of Homeland Security to collect a wide range of sensitive biometric data on all immigrants, without age restrictions, and store that data throughout each person’s “lifecycle” in the immigration system.

If adopted, the rule change would allow DHS agencies, including Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), to broadly collect facial imagery, finger and palm prints, iris scans, and voice prints. They may also request DNA, which DHS claimed “would only be collected in limited circumstances,” like to verify family relations. These updates would cost taxpayers $288.7 million annually, DHS estimated, including $57.1 million for DNA collection alone. Annual individual charges to immigrants submitting data will likely be similarly high, estimated at around $231.5 million.

Costs could be higher, DHS admitted, especially if DNA testing is conducted more widely than projected.

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Quantum computers based on ions or atoms have one major advantage: the hardware itself isn’t manufactured, so there’s no device-to-device variability. Every atom is the same and should perform similarly every time. And since the qubits themselves can be moved around, it’s theoretically possible to entangle any atom or ion with any other in the system, allowing for a lot of flexibility in how algorithms and error correction are performed.

This combination of consistent, high-fidelity performance with all-to-all connectivity has led many key demonstrations of quantum computing to be done on trapped-ion hardware. Unfortunately, the hardware has been held back a bit by relatively low qubit counts—a few dozen compared to the hundred or more seen in other technologies. But on Wednesday, a company called Quantinuum announced a new version of its trapped-ion hardware that significantly boosts the qubit count and uses some interesting technology to manage their operation.

Trapped-ion computing

Both neutral atom and trapped-ion computers store their qubits in the spin of the nucleus. That spin is somewhat shielded from the environment by the cloud of electrons around the nucleus, giving these qubits a relatively long coherence time. While neutral atoms are held in place by a network of lasers, trapped ions are manipulated via electromagnetic control based on the ion’s charge. This means that key components of the hardware can be built using standard electronic manufacturing, although lasers are still needed for manipulations and readout.

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