Ever felt like mosquitoes bite you while ignoring everyone else? Scientists are now making progress in deciphering the complex chemical cocktail that makes particular people more enticing to these disease-spreading bloodsuckers. “It’s not a misconception — mosquitoes are attracted to some people more than others,” Frederic Simard of France’s Institute of Research for Development told AFP. “But we are not all magnets all the time,” the medical entomologist added.

A range of sensory cues can cause mosquitoes to pick one human over another — mainly the smell and heat our bodies give off, and the carbon dioxide we exhale. Female mosquitoes — which are the only ones that bite — detect these signals with finely tuned receptors, then choose their target accordingly. “We have known for over 100 years that mosquitoes are attracted by the carbon dioxide that we exhale — this is the first signal that triggers their behavior” when they are dozens of meters away, Swedish scientist Rickard Ignell told AFP. Within around 10 meters, “mosquitoes will start detecting our odor, and in combination with carbon dioxide,” this attracts them even more, said the senior author of a recent study on the subject. As they get closer, body temperature and humidity make particular humans even more enticing.

[…] For Ignell’s recent study, the researchers released Aedes aegypti mosquitoes — known for spreading yellow fever and dengue — on 42 women in a lab, to see which ones they preferred. “We have shown that mosquitoes use a blend of odorous compounds (we identified 27 that the mosquitoes will detect, out of the possible 1,000) for their attraction to us,” Ignell said. The woman the mosquitoes most liked to bite — which included pregnant women in their second trimester — produced a large amount of a particular compound made by a breakdown of the skin oil sebum. That even a small increase of this compound — called “1-octen-3-ol”, or mushroom alcohol — made a difference came as a surprise, Ignell emphasized.

Before Elon Musk left OpenAI in a power struggle in 2018, he wanted to merge the nonprofit artificial intelligence lab with Tesla, his electric car company. Mr. Musk and other OpenAI co-founders met several times to discuss the merger. OpenAI’s chief executive, Sam Altman, was even offered a seat on Tesla’s board of directors, according to a court document. But folding OpenAI into Tesla would have eliminated the lab’s nonprofit status, and that, Mr. Altman said on the witness stand on Tuesday, was something he wanted to avoid. […] “I believed that A.I. should not be under the control of any one person,” Mr. Altman said. […] Mr. Altman testified about his feud with Mr. Musk. He said he had become worried that Mr. Musk, who provided the early investment money for OpenAI, wanted to take control of the lab. He described what he called a “particularly harrowing moment” when his OpenAI co-founders asked Mr. Musk what would happen to his control of a potential for-profit when he died. Mr. Altman said Mr. Musk had replied that the control would pass to his children. “I was not comfortable with that,” Mr. Altman said. When Mr. Musk lost a power struggle for control of the lab, he left, forcing Mr. Altman to find another big financial backer in Microsoft.

But Mr. Altman ran into trouble in 2023 when OpenAI’s board fired him because, as several of its members have testified in the trial, it didn’t trust him. Steven Molo, Mr. Musk’s lead lawyer, homed in on Mr. Altman’s trustworthiness during an aggressive cross-examination. “Are you completely trustworthy?” Mr. Molo asked. “I believe so,” Mr. Altman answered. After questioning Mr. Altman’s trustworthiness for nearly 20 minutes, Mr. Molo turned to Mr. Altman’s relationship with Mr. Musk. Mr. Altman said that after he met Mr. Musk in the mid-2010s, Mr. Musk had occasionally expressed concern about the dangers of A.I. But Mr. Musk spent far more time saying he was worried that companies like Google would get ahead in A.I. development, Mr. Altman said. (Mr. Musk testified in the trial that he had wanted to create OpenAI to prevent Google from controlling the technology.)

Mr. Altman, the lawyer intimated, took advantage of Mr. Musk’s concerns and was never sincere about his own A.I. fears. “Are you a person who just tells people things they want to hear whether those things are true or not?” Mr. Molo asked. The lawyer also questioned whether Mr. Atman, who became a billionaire through years of tech investments, was self-dealing through OpenAI. Mr. Molo showed a list of Mr. Altman’s personal investments across a number of companies that stand to benefit from their association with OpenAI. They included Helion Energy, a start-up that has deals with Microsoft and OpenAI, and Cerebras, a chip maker in business with OpenAI. Mr. Molo asked if Mr. Altman, who is on OpenAI’s board as well as its chief executive, would ever fire himself. “I have no plans to do that,” Mr. Altman said.

OpenAI’s odd journey from nonprofit lab to what it is today — a well-funded, for-profit company that is still connected to a nonprofit called the OpenAI Foundation with an endowment that could be worth more than $130 billion — provided grist for Mr. Molo’s questions about Mr. Altman’s motivations. He implied that Mr. Altman could have continued to build OpenAI as a pure nonprofit. But the only way to build such a valuable charity was to raise billions through a for-profit venture, Mr. Altman responded. Still, the giant sums being raised appeared to upset Mr. Musk. In late 2022, according to court documents, Mr. Musk sent a text to Mr. Altman complaining that Microsoft was preparing to invest $10 billion in OpenAI. “This is a bait and switch,” Mr. Musk said at the time. But Mr. Altman, under questioning from his own lawyers, said: “Every step of the way, I have done my best to maximize the value of the nonprofit. I would point out that there are not a lot of historical examples of a nonprofit at this scale.”

Presidential policy chief Kim Yong-beom said in a Facebook post that a portion of the profits and tax revenue derived from the artificial intelligence boom “should be structurally returned to all citizens.” That is because, Mr Kim argued, the economic gains from AI are based at least partly on industrial infrastructure built by the country over five decades. Mr Kim’s comments come after tens of thousands of people gathered outside Samsung’s main chip hub in April to demand employees get a greater share of AI profits. The company’s labour union wants 15 per cent of operating profit handed to chip-division employees.

The union has threatened an 18-day strike starting May 21. Workers have pointed to rising payouts at SK Hynix, which in 2025 agreed to allocate 10 per cent of its annual operating profit to a performance bonus pool, as evidence they deserve more pay. “Excess profits in the AI era are, by nature, concentrated,” Mr Kim wrote. Memory companies, core engineers and asset holders are highly likely to receive substantial benefits, while much of the middle class may experience only indirect effects.

Paying cyber criminals goes against the advice of law enforcement agencies around the world, as it can fuel further attacks and offers no guarantee the data has been deleted. In previous cases, criminals have accepted ransom payments but lied about destroying stolen data, instead keeping it for resale. For example, when the notorious LockBit ransomware group was hacked by the National Crime Agency, police found stolen data had not been deleted even after payments had been made.

Instructure said in a statement on its website that protecting students’ and education staff data was its primary motivation. “While there is never complete certainty when dealing with cyber criminals, we believe it was important to take every step within our control to give customers additional peace of mind, to the extent possible,” the company said. Instructure did not set out the terms of the agreement but said that it meant that:
- the data was returned to the company
- it received “digital confirmation of data destruction”
- it had been informed that no Instructure customers would be extorted as a result of the incident
- the agreement covers all affected customers, with no need for individuals to engage with the hackers

Amazon employees are using an internal AI tool to automate non-essential tasks in a bid to show managers they are using the technology more frequently. The Seattle-based group has started to widely deploy its in-house “MeshClaw” product in recent weeks, allowing employees to create AI agents that can connect to workplace software and carry out tasks on a user’s behalf, according to three people familiar with the matter. Some employees said colleagues were using the software to automate additional, unnecessary AI activity to increase their consumption of tokens — units of data processed by models. They said the move reflected pressure to adopt the technology after Amazon introduced targets for more than 80 percent of developers to use AI each week, and earlier this year began tracking AI token consumption on internal leader boards.

“There is just so much pressure to use these tools,” one Amazon employee told the FT. “Some people are just using MeshClaw to maximize their token usage.” Amazon has told employees that the AI token statistics would not be used in performance evaluations. But several staff members said they believed managers were monitoring the data. “Managers are looking at it,” said another current employee. “When they track usage it creates perverse incentives and some people are very competitive about it.”

“We’ll have more to share on the exact OS branding later this year,” Peter Du of Google’s global communications team tells The Verge. […] Googlebooks will have a Magic Pointer feature that offers contextual suggestions whenever you shake your cursor and point it at something on the screen. Google’s examples include setting up a meeting by pointing at a date in an email or selecting images of furniture and a living space to visualize them together. Beyond your mouse pointer, Googlebooks will also feature the custom AI-created widgets that Google is also debuting today for Android phones and Wear OS smartwatches. I don’t know what kind of horrors people will be able to make into widgets, but Google gives the example of making one to organize your flights, hotel information, restaurant reservations, and another for creating a countdown timer for an upcoming family reunion. (It’s always flights, hotels, and restaurants, isn’t it?)

While there are many outstanding questions to be answered about Googlebooks, the biggest and most obvious ones are what will these laptops look like, what chips will be in them, and what will they cost? We’ve got none of that so far. Google only has some initial renders of a mysterious Googlebook and the promise that it’s working with Acer, Asus, Dell, HP, and Lenovo to make the first models. There are no model names. No specs. Nada. Google isn’t even saying if the laptop in its renders is made by a partner or a tease of some first-party Pixel-like Googlebook to come or is just a cool mockup. The one distinct hardware feature shown, the bar of glowing Google-colored light, will be a signature of all Googlebooks. (Sure, bring on the RGB. Why not?)

The project, announced in May 2024 during Ruto’s visit to Washington, was supposed to bring a geothermal-powered data center to the Olkaria region in Kenya’s Rift Valley. G42 was to lead construction, with the facility running Microsoft Azure in a new East Africa cloud region. The first phase targeted 100 megawatts of capacity and was expected to be operational by this year, with a long-term goal of scaling to 1 gigawatt.

President Ruto isn’t exaggerating about shutting off half the country’s power. Kenya’s total installed electricity capacity sits between 3,000 and 3,200 megawatts, and peak demand reached a record 2,444 megawatts in January, according to data from KenGen, the country’s government-owned electricity producer. The full 1 gigawatt build would therefore have consumed roughly a third of the country’s total capacity, and even the first 100 megawatts would have required a significant share of the Olkaria geothermal complex’s output, which currently generates around 950MW across all its plants.

John Tanui, principal secretary at Kenya’s Ministry of Information, told Bloomberg that the project hasn’t been withdrawn and that talks are continuing, adding that the “scale of the data center they [Microsoft] wanted to do still requires some structuring.” A separate 60-megawatt project with local developer EcoCloud is also still under discussion. […] Microsoft is spending $190 billion on capex in 2026, and the company adds approximately 1 gigawatt of data center capacity every three months globally. But power constraints are proving to be a universal bottleneck: nearly half of planned U.S. data center builds this year have been delayed or canceled due to shortages of electrical infrastructure.

“We are taking action against TikTok and its addictive design — endless scrolling, autoplay, and push notifications. The same applies to Meta, because we believe Instagram and Facebook are failing to enforce their own minimum age of 13,” Von der Leyen said. “We are investigating platforms that allow children to go down ‘rabbit holes’ of harmful content — such as videos that promote eating disorders or self-harm,” she added.

The EU’s executive arm has also developed its own age verification app, which has the “highest privacy standards in the world,” according to Von der Leyen. Member states will soon be able to integrate it into their digital wallets, and it can easily be enforced by online platforms. “No more excuses — the technology for age-verification is available,” the EU chief said. The EU Commission could have a legal proposal prepared as soon as the summer, as it awaits the advice and findings of its ‘Special Panel of experts on Child Safety Online.’

EBay on Tuesday rejected a $56 billion takeover bid from the much smaller GameStop over financing doubts, calling the proposal “neither credible nor attractive.” EBay, which has roughly four times GameStop’s market value, also underscored that its turnaround efforts under CEO Jamie Iannone have boosted growth, with its stock returning 201% since Iannone took the position six years ago.

“We have concluded that your proposal is neither credible nor attractive,” eBay Chairman Paul Pressler said in a statement. “eBay’s Board is confident the company, under its current management team, is well-positioned to continue to drive sustainable growth.” He also pointed to concerns with GameStop’s bid, including its financing, its impact on eBay’s long-term growth and the leadership structure of a potentially combined company.

Under the original FCC ruling, foreign manufacturers were permitted to provide only limited maintenance and security patches to US customers through March 2027. In a public note (PDF) on May 8, the FCC extended that deadline to at least January 2029 and also expanded the scope of permissible updates. The FCC will now allow foreign manufacturers to provide not just minor security fixes and changes, but also more major software and firmware updates that could affect router functionality, which previously required additional FCC review. The agency described the revisions as intended to ensure the continued safety of already deployed foreign-made consumer routers in the US.

In the new study, Columbia researchers teamed up with surgeons and their epilepsy patients who were undergoing brain surgery to better pinpoint the sources of their seizures. The hospital patients, who volunteered to be part of this study, already had electrodes implanted in their brains. [senior author Nima Mesgarani’s] system used the electrodes to measure the brain activity of the patients as they focused on one of two overlapping conversations played simultaneously. The system then automatically detected which conversation a patient was paying attention to and adjusted the volume in real time, turning up that conversation while quieting the other. For one volunteer, the experience of controlling the system with her brain was literally unbelievable. She accused the researchers of secretly adjusting the volumes. Others told stories about friends and family with hearing impairments who could benefit from such a technology. One person said: “It seems like science fiction.”

[…] The scientists developed real-time machine-learning algorithms that could examine the brainwaves and identify which conversation the patients were paying attention to. Once deployed, their system could rapidly deduce which conversation each listener was paying attention to and make it easier for them to hear it. This happened both when the researchers guided the subjects toward a particular conversation, and when the subjects chose freely, as would be necessary in a real-world conversation. “For this to work in real time, the system has to be very fast, accurate and stable for the experience to feel pleasant for the listener,” Dr. Mesgarani said. The scientists found their new system correctly identified which conversation the volunteers paid attention to. This dramatically improved the intelligibility of the speech the volunteers focused on, reduced listening effort, and was consistently preferred by the volunteers when compared to conversations the system did not provide assistance with. One volunteer recalled her uncle, who had hearing problems. “Can you imagine if this technology existed in a world [where] … he could access it? He might actually live a much more peaceful… life.”

Singing, painting or visiting a gallery or museum helps people age more slowly, according to the latest study to link taking an active interest in art and culture with improved health. The findings are the first to show that both participating in arts activities and attending events, such as viewing an exhibition, lead to people staying biologically younger. “These results demonstrate the health impact of the arts at a biological level. They provide evidence for arts and cultural engagement to be recognized as a health-promoting behavior in a similar way to exercise,” said Prof Daisy Fancourt, the lead author of the research and the head of the social biobehavioral research group at University College London.

However, slower aging does not necessarily mean someone will live longer. The “epigenetic clocks” used in the study to assess biological ageing are predictive of future morbidity and mortality, and previous studies have suggested a link between arts engagement and longer lifespan, but much more research would be needed to establish potential causal effects on longevity. Those who take part in artistic pursuits the most often slow the pace of their biological aging the most. Under one of the study’s methods of assessment, those who did so at least weekly slowed their aging process by 4%, while monthly engagement led to it slowing by 3%.

Similarly, another of the tests showed that those who undertook an arts activity at least once a week were on average a year younger biologically than those who rarely engaged in such pursuits. Those who exercised once a week were only six months younger by that measure. The benefit the arts confer on the pace at which people age is so dramatic that it is comparable to the difference between smokers and those who have given up smoking, the researchers say. The results, published in the journal Innovation in Aging, are based on blood test and survey response data from 3,556 adults taking part in the UK Household Longitudinal Study. It uses blood samples to estimate people’s biological age and the pace at which they are ageing.

Nadella said he was “very proud” that Microsoft took the risk to invest in OpenAI when “no one else was willing” to bet on the fledgling lab. Musk, who testified late last month, said Microsoft’s $10 billion investment was the key tipping point that made him believe OpenAI was violating its nonprofit mission. He testified that the scale of the investment bothered him, and it prompted him to open a legal investigation into OpenAI. “I was concerned they were really trying to steal the charity,” Musk said from the stand.

Nadella said he did not believe Microsoft’s investments in OpenAI were donations, and that there was a clear commercial element to their partnership from the outset. He said during the partnership’s early years, Microsoft gave OpenAI sharp discounts on computing resources, and Microsoft believed it would reap marketing benefits from doing so. During a separate video deposition that was played on Monday morning, Michael Wetter, a corporate development executive at Microsoft, said the company has recognized approximately $9.5 billion in revenue to date through its partnership with OpenAI as of March 2025.

[…] Nadella said he was “pretty surprised” by the board’s decision [to fire Altman in November 2023], and that his priority was to try and figure out how to maintain continuity for Microsoft customers. Immediately after Altman was removed, Nadella said he made an effort to learn more about what happened, adding that he suspected jealousy and poor communication was at play. During conversations with OpenAI board members after the firing, Nadella said he was simply trying to understand the language in the OpenAI’s statement about Altman being “not consistently candid” while communicating with the board. That language, Nadella said, “just didn’t sort of suffice, because this is the CEO of a company that we are invested in and we’re deeply partnered with, and so I felt that they could have explained to me what are the incidents or what is the detail behind it.” There must have been instances of jealousy or miscommunication that could have justified pushing out Altman, Nadella said. He wanted more depth from the board members after the remark about candor, but no such information was available, he said. “It was sort of amateur city, as far as I’m concerned,” Nadella testified.

[…] Musk testified that he is not entirely against OpenAI having a for-profit unit, but he said it became “the tail wagging the dog.” He repeatedly accused Altman and Brockman of enriching themselves from a charity while also reaping the positive associations that come from running a nonprofit. “Microsoft has their own motivations, and that would be different from the motivations of the charity,” Musk said from the stand. “All due respect to Microsoft, do you really want Microsoft controlling digital superintelligence?”

During a videotaped deposition shown in court last week, former OpenAI director Tasha McCauley recalled a discussion with Nadella and her fellow board members after the 2023 decision to dismiss Altman as OpenAI’s CEO. “To the best of my recollection, Satya wanted to restore things to as they had been,” McCauley said. The board members didn’t think that was the right move, she said. But as a court witness on Monday, Nadella said he never demanded that the board reinstate Altman as OpenAI CEO.

The details were revealed in a May 15, 2025 letter from the Fayette County water system to Quality Technology Services, which outlined the retroactive charge of $147,474. The letter did not specify how many months the unpaid bill covered, but when asked about it Wednesday, Vanessa Tigert, the Fayette County water system director, said it was likely about four months. A QTS spokesperson said the timeframe was 9-15 months. Once the data center was notified, it paid all retroactive charges, a QTS spokesperson said in an email, noting the unmetered water consumption occurred while the county converted its system to smart meters.

The Fayette County water system confirmed the data center’s meters are now fully integrated and tracked. Tigert, the water system director, blamed the issue on a procedural mix-up. “Fayette County is a suburb, it’s mostly residential, and we don’t have much commercial meters in our system anyway,” she said. “And so we didn’t realize our connection point wasn’t working.” The incident became public last week when a county resident obtained the 2025 letter to QTS through a public records request and posted it on Facebook, prompting outrage from residents concerned about the data center’s water consumption. […]

Tigert, who sent the 2025 letter to QTS, said the utility didn’t know about the water hookups because the connection process “got mixed up” as the county transitioned to a cloud-based system while also trying to accommodate an industrial customer. Tigert also said her staff is small and at capacity. “Just like any water system, we don’t have enough staff. We can’t keep staff,” she said. “I’ve got one person that’s doing inspections and plan review, and so he’s spread pretty thin.” She said it’s possible her staff did know about hookups but that she hadn’t been able to locate the inspection report. “I may have hit ‘send’ too soon,” she said about the 2025 letter to QTS. While the utility charged the data center a higher construction rate for the unapproved water consumption, Tigert confirmed the utility did not penalize or fine the data center.

On Friday evening, the founder previewed a link to the newly redesigned Digg, which now looks nothing like a Reddit clone and more like the news aggregator it once was. This time around, the site is focused on ranking news — specifically, AI news to start. In an email to beta testers, the company said the site’s goal is to “track the most influential voices in a space” and to surface the news that’s actually worth “paying attention to.” AI is the area it’s testing this idea with, but if successful, Digg will expand to include other topics. The email warned that the site was still raw and “buggy,” and was designed more to give users a first look than to serve as its public debut.

On the current homepage, Digg showcases four main stories at the top: the most viewed story, a story seeing rising discussion, the fastest-climbing story, and one “In case you missed it” headline. Below that is a ranked list of top stories for the day, complete with engagement metrics like views, comments, likes, and saves. But the twist is that these metrics aren’t the ones generated on Digg itself. Instead, Digg is ingesting content from X in real-time to determine what’s being discussed, while also performing sentiment analysis, clustering, and signal detection to determine what matters most. […] The site also ranks the top 1,000 people involved in AI, as well as the top companies and the top politicians focused on AI issues.