Evolution has adapted the digits of mammals for an enormous range of uses, from our opposable thumbs to the spindly digits that support bat wings to the robust bones that support the hoofs of horses. But how we got digits in the first place hasn't been entirely clear. The fish that limbed vertebrates evolved from don't have obvious digit equivalents, and the most common types of fish just have a large collection of rays supporting their fins.

Despite this uncertainty, we have identified some genes that seem to be essential for both digit formation and the development of rays in the fins of fish, suggesting that there are parallels between the two. But a new study suggests that these parallels are a bit of an accident, and digits come by re-deploying a genetic network that controls a completely different process: the formation of the cloaca, a single organ that handles all of the fish's excretion.

Hox genes and digits

One of the key regulators of limb development is a set of genes called homeobox proteins, which attach to DNA and regulate the activity of nearby genes. In animals, many of these homeobox, or hox genes, are formed into clusters. Mammals have four clusters of hox genes, each of which encodes roughly 10 individual homeobox proteins. The cluster helps to organize where the hox genes are active, with the genes at one end of the cluster being active at the front of an embryo, and those at the other end active at the tail.

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Anthropic's AI models could potentially help spies analyze classified documents, but the company draws the line at domestic surveillance. That restriction is reportedly making the Trump administration angry.

On Tuesday, Semafor reported that Anthropic faces growing hostility from the Trump administration over the AI company's restrictions on law enforcement uses of its Claude models. Two senior White House officials told the outlet that federal contractors working with agencies like the FBI and Secret Service have run into roadblocks when attempting to use Claude for surveillance tasks.

The friction stems from Anthropic's usage policies that prohibit domestic surveillance applications. The officials, who spoke to Semafor anonymously, said they worry that Anthropic enforces its policies selectively based on politics and uses vague terminology that allows for a broad interpretation of its rules.

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Health secretary and anti-vaccine activist Robert F. Kennedy Jr. plans to roll back access to lifesaving vaccines for children, and has refused to even speak with staff scientists and subject-matter experts at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention about evidence-based recommendations. That's according to former CDC officials who testified before the Senate on Wednesday.

The Senate Committee on Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions (HELP) called ex-CDC director Susan Monarez to review the chaos that has engulfed the public health agency under Kennedy. Monarez, a microbiologist and long-serving federal employee, led the CDC as the first Senate-confirmed director for just 29 days before her dramatic ouster last month . She appeared before the HELP committee alongside Debra Houry, the former chief medical officer for the CDC. Houry had worked at the agency for a decade—spanning four administrations and six directors— before resigning in protest against Kennedy's leadership soon after Monarez's ouster.

Monarez’s ouster

Much of their testimony today was alarming, but not surprising. Upon her exit, Monarez claimed that she was fired because she refused Kennedy's demand that she agree in advance to approve changes to the CDC's childhood vaccine recommendations regardless of whether any scientific evidence supported the changes. She also claimed that Kennedy demanded that she fire CDC scientific leadership without cause, which she also refused to do. Similarly, when Houry resigned, she said Kennedy was censoring science, steamrolling CDC experts, and spreading misinformation. In the hearing today, the two stood by their previous comments and provided more details.

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When I was a child, SimCity 2000 felt like a fun, animated set of urban-themed Lego blocks to tinker with. Revisiting the game roughly three decades later, though, I've found the weight of my adult responsibilities tempering my role as god-mayor of a tiny metropolis.

The tough economics of establishing a thriving city barely concerned me as a child. Rather than building up a durable tax base from a slowly growing city of happy citizens, I'd usually type in an infinite money cheat or load up the handy Urban Renewal Kit expansion to build whatever I wanted, wherever I wanted, as quickly as possible.

A blank canvas, ready for me to destroy. Credit: Maxis

Thus unleashed, my childhood self would go mad with unchecked power, petulantly turning dials just to see what happened to the citizens in my virtual ant farm. Sometimes I'd try to arrange a repeating grid of fancy arcologies and police stations, trying to create a regimented utopia out of the game's most expensive (and therefore "best") building type. More often, I'd play with the far edges of the simulation, crowding residential areas next to polluting heavy industry or letting entire neighborhoods go without fire protection and waiting to see how long it took for things to fall apart.

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The Trump administration yesterday issued a lengthier denial of a whistleblower's allegation that DOGE officials at the Social Security Administration (SSA) copied the agency's database to an insecure cloud system. The allegation centers on the Numerical Identification System (NUMIDENT) database containing Americans' personally identifiable information.

The cloud location described by the whistleblower report "is actually a secured server in the agency's cloud infrastructure which historically has housed this data and is continuously monitored and overseen—SSA's standard practice," said a letter sent yesterday to Senate Finance Committee Chairman Mike Crapo (R-Idaho).

The letter was sent by SSA Commissioner Frank Bisignano, a Trump appointee who was previously CEO of the financial technology company Fiserv. It came in response to Crapo's request for information.

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Like the rest of its Big Tech cadre, Google has spent lavishly on developing generative AI models. Google's AI can clean up your text messages and summarize the web, but the company is constantly looking to prove that its generative AI has true intelligence. The International Collegiate Programming Contest (ICPC) helps make the point. Google says Gemini 2.5 participated in the 2025 ICPC World Finals, turning in a gold medal performance. According to Google this marks "a significant step on our path toward artificial general intelligence."

Every year, thousands of college-level coders participate in the ICPC event, facing a dozen deviously complex coding and algorithmic puzzles over five grueling hours. This is the largest and longest-running competition of its type. To compete in the ICPC, Google connected Gemini 2.5 Deep Think to a remote online environment approved by the ICPC. The human competitors were given a head start of 10 minutes before Gemini began "thinking."

According to Google, it did not create a freshly trained model for the ICPC like it did for the similar International Mathematical Olympiad (IMO) earlier this year. The Gemini 2.5 AI that participated in the ICPC is the same general model that we see in other Gemini applications. However, it was "enhanced" to churn through thinking tokens for the five-hour duration of the competition in search of solutions.

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Deeply troubled parents spoke to senators Tuesday, sounding alarms about chatbot harms after kids became addicted to companion bots that encouraged self-harm, suicide, and violence.

While the hearing was focused on documenting the most urgent child-safety concerns with chatbots, parents' testimony serves as perhaps the most thorough guidance yet on warning signs for other families, as many popular companion bots targeted in lawsuits, including ChatGPT , remain accessible to kids.

Mom details warning signs of chatbot manipulations

At the Senate Judiciary Committee’s Subcommittee on Crime and Counterterrorism hearing, one mom, identified as "Jane Doe," shared her son's story for the first time publicly after suing Character.AI.

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Sony Pictures has dropped a trailer for its upcoming horror comedy, Anaconda , a meta-reboot of the 1997 campy cult classic —and frankly, it looks like a lot of fun. Starring Paul Rudd and Jack Black, the film will arrive in theaters on Christmas Day.

(Spoilers for the 1997 film below.)

The original Anaconda was your basic B-movie creature feature, only with an all-star cast and better production values. The plot revolved around a documentary film crew (Jennifer Lopez, Ice Cube, Eric Stoltz, Jonathan Hyde, and Owen Wilson) who travel to the Amazon in search of a long-lost Indigenous tribe. They take on a stranded Paraguayan snake hunter named Serone (Jon Voight, affecting a hilariously bad foreign accent), who strong-arms them into helping him hunt down a 25-foot green anaconda. He wants to capture the animal alive, thinking he can sell it for over $1 million.

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When Elon Musk's Department of Government Efficiency began wielding its ax at the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration earlier this year, many believed this was done to weaken the agency's oversight over Tesla. But despite the Tesla CEO's sometimes-close relationship with the Trump administration, it appears there is still some independence left within NHTSA: earlier this week, the agency opened a new safety investigation into the door handles of the Tesla Model Y.

The timing may not be coincidental; last week, the safety hazard posed by badly designed retractable door handles entered the spotlight thanks to a comprehensive report by Bloomberg's Dana Hull. As Hull detailed, Tesla's door handles rely on the car's 12 V battery to work. Should this fail, there is no way to open the doors from the outside, something that has cost lives as first responders have been unable to free occupants from burning Teslas.

While front seat passengers have easily accessible interior emergency door releases, some Teslas lack any way of opening the rear doors from the inside after a crash. Other, more recent Models 3 and Y have manual releases located under a panel underneath the rear seat.

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