syndication

Trump has “a little problem” with Apple’s plan to ship iPhones from India

Apple, india, IPhone, Policy, syndication, tariffs, Trump / Kelly Newman / May 15, 2025

Analysts estimate it would cost tens of billions of dollars and take years for Apple to increase iPhone manufacturing in the US, where it at present makes only a very limited number of products.

US Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick said last month that Cook had told him the US would need “robotic arms” to replicate the “scale and precision” of iPhone manufacturing in China.

“He’s going to build it here,” Lutnick told CNBC. “And Americans are going to be the technicians who drive those factories. They’re not going to be the ones screwing it in.”

Lutnick added that his previous comments that an “army of millions and millions of human beings screwing in little screws to make iPhones—that kind of thing is going to come to America” had been taken out of context.

“Americans are going to work in factories just like this on great, high-paying jobs,” he added.

For Narendra Modi’s government, the shift by some Apple suppliers into India is the highest-profile success of a drive to boost local manufacturing and attract companies seeking to diversify away from China.

Mobile phones are now one of India’s top exports, with the country selling more than $7 billion worth of them to the US in the 2024-25 financial year, up from $4.7 billion the previous year. The majority of these were iPhones, which Apple’s suppliers Foxconn and Tata Electronics make at plants in southern India’s Tamil Nadu and Karnataka states.

Modi and Trump are ideologically aligned and personally friendly, but India’s high tariffs are a point of friction and Washington has threatened to hit it with a 26 percent tariff.

India and the US—its biggest trading partner—are negotiating a bilateral trade agreement, the first tranche of which they say they will be agreed by autumn.

“India’s one of the highest-tariff nations in the world, it’s very hard to sell into India,” Trump also said in Qatar on Thursday. “They’ve offered us a deal where basically they’re willing to literally charge us no tariff… they’re the highest and now they’re saying no tariff.”

Trump has “a little problem” with Apple’s plan to ship iPhones from India Read More »

Incorporated in US: $8.4B money launderer for Chinese-speaking crypto scammers

crypto scams, Cryptocurrency, investment scams, Security, syndication, Xinbi Guarantee / Beth Washington / May 14, 2025

Before crackdown, this was one of the ‘Net’s biggest markets for Chinese-speaking scammers.

As the underground industry of crypto investment scams has grown into one of the world’s most lucrative forms of cybercrime, the secondary market of money launderers for those scammers has grown to match it. Amid that black market, one such Chinese-language service on the messaging platform Telegram blossomed into an all-purpose underground bazaar: It has offered not only cash-out services to scammers but also money laundering for North Korean hackers, stolen data, targeted harassment-for-hire, and even what appears to be sex trafficking. And somehow, it’s all overseen by a company legally registered in the United States.

According to new research released today by crypto-tracing firm Elliptic, a company called Xinbi Guarantee has since 2022 facilitated no less than $8.4 billion in transactions via its Telegram-based marketplace prior to Telegram’s actions in recent days to remove its accounts from the platform. Money stolen from scam victims likely represents the “vast majority” of that sum, according to Elliptic’s cofounder Tom Robinson. Yet even as the market serves Chinese-speaking scammers, it also boasts on the top of its website—in Mandarin—that it’s registered in Colorado.

“Xinbi Guarantee has served as a giant, purportedly US-incorporated illicit online marketplace for online scams that primarily offers money laundering services,” says Robinson. He adds, though, that Elliptic has also found a remarkable variety of other criminal offerings on the market: child-bearing surrogacy and egg donors, harassment services that offer to threaten or throw feces at any chosen victim, and even sex workers in their teens who are likely trafficking victims.

Xinbi Guarantee is the second such crime-friendly Chinese-language market that Robinson and his team of researchers have uncovered over the past year. Last July, they published a report on Huione Guarantee, a similar Cambodia-based service that Elliptic said in January had facilitated $24 billion in transactions—largely from crypto scammers—making it the biggest illicit online marketplace in history by Elliptic’s accounting. That market’s parent company, Huione Group, was added to a list of known money laundering operations by the US Treasury’s Financial Crimes Enforcement Network earlier this month in an attempt to limit its access to US financial institutions.

Telegram bans

After WIRED reached out to Telegram last week about the illicit activity taking place on Xinbi Guarantee’s and Huione Guarantee’s channels on its messaging platform, Telegram appears to have responded Monday by banning many of the central channels and administrator accounts used by both Xinbi Guarantee and Huione Guarantee. “Criminal activities like scamming or money laundering are forbidden by Telegram’s terms of service and are always removed whenever discovered,” Telegram spokesperson Remi Vaughn wrote to WIRED in a statement. “Communities previously reported to us by WIRED or included in reports published by Elliptic have all been taken down.”

Telegram had banned several of Huione Guarantee’s channels in February following an earlier Elliptic report on the marketplace, but Huione Guarantee quickly re-created them, and it’s not clear whether the new removals will prevent the two companies from rebuilding their presence on Telegram again, perhaps with new accounts or even new branding. “These are very lucrative businesses, and they’ll attempt to rebuild in some way,” Robinson said of the two marketplaces following Telegram’s latest purge.

Elliptic’s accounting of the total lifetime revenue of the biggest online black markets.Courtesy of Elliptic

Xinbi Guarantee didn’t respond to multiple requests for comment on Elliptic’s findings that WIRED sent to the market’s administrators on Telegram.

Like Huione Guarantee, Xinbi Guarantee has offered a similar “guarantee” model of enabling third-party vendors to offer services by requiring a deposit from them to prevent fraud. Yet it’s flown under the radar, even as it grew into one of the biggest hubs for crypto crime on the Internet. In terms of scale of transactions prior to Telegram’s crackdown, it was second only to Huione’s market, according to Elliptic.

Both services “offer a window into the China-based underground banking network,” Robinson says. “It’s another example of these huge Chinese-language ‘guaranteed’ marketplaces that have thrived for years.”

On Xinbi Guarantee, Elliptic found numerous posts from vendors offering to accept funds related to “quick kills,” “slow kills,” and “pig butchering” transactions, all different terms for crypto investment scams and other forms of fraud. In some cases, Robinson explains, these Xinbi Guarantee vendors offer bank accounts in the same country as the victim so that they can receive whatever payment they’re tricked into making, then pay the scammer in the cryptocurrency Tether. In other cases, the Xinbi Guarantee merchants offer to receive cryptocurrency payments and cash them out in the scammer’s local currency, such as Chinese renminbi.

Not just money laundering

Aside from Xinbi Guarantee’s central use as a cash-out point for crypto scammers, Elliptic also found that the market’s vendors offered other wares for scammers such as stolen data that could be used for finding victims, as well as services for registering SIM cards and Starlink Internet subscriptions through proxies.

North Korean state-sponsored cybercriminals also appear to have used the platform for money laundering. Elliptic found through blockchain analysis, for instance, that about $220,000 stolen from the Indian cryptocurrency exchange WazirX—the victim of a $235 million theft in July 2024, widely attributed to North Korean hackers—had flowed into Xinbi Guarantee in a series of transactions in November.

Those money-laundering and scam-enabling services, however, are far from the only shady offerings found on Xinbi Guarantee’s market. Elliptic also found listings for surrogate mothers and egg donors, with one post showing faceless pictures of the donor’s body. Other accounts have offered services that will, for a payment in Tether, place a funeral wreath at a target’s door, deface their home with graffiti, post damaging statements around their home, have someone verbally threaten them, throw feces at them, or even, most bizarrely, surround their home with AIDS patients. One posting suggested these AIDS patients would carry “case reports and needles for intimidation.”

Other listings have offered sex workers as young as 18 years old, noting the specific sex acts that are allowed and forbidden. Elliptic says that one of its researchers was even offered a 14-year-old by a Xinbi Guarantee merchant. (The account holder noted, however, that no transaction for sex with someone below the age of 18 would be guaranteed by Xinbi. The legal age of consent in China is 14.)

Exactly why Xinbi Guarantee is legally registered in the US remains a mystery. Its incorporation record on the Colorado Secretary of State’s website shows an address at an office park in the city of Aurora that has no external Xinbi branding. The company appears to have been registered there in August of 2022 by someone named “Mohd Shahrulnizam Bin Abd Manap.” (WIRED connected that name with several people in Malaysia but couldn’t determine which one might be Xinbi Guarantee’s registrant.) The listing is currently marked as “delinquent,” perhaps due to failure to file more recent paperwork to renew it.

For fledgling Chinese companies—legitimate and illegitimate—incorporating in the US is an increasingly common tactic for “projecting legitimacy,” says Jacob Sims, a visiting fellow at Harvard’s Asia Center who focuses on transnational Chinese crime. “If you have a US presence, you can also open US bank accounts,” Sims says. “You could potentially hire staff in the US. You could in theory have more formalized connections to US entities.” But he notes that the registration’s delinquent status may mean Xinbi Guarantee tried to make some sort of inroads in the US in the past but gave up.

While Telegram has served as the chief means of communication for the two markets, the stablecoin cryptocurrency Tether has served as their primary means of payment, Elliptic found. And despite Telegram’s new round of removals of their channels and accounts, Xinbi Guarantee and Huione Guarantee are far from the only companies to use Tether and Telegram to create essentially a new, largely Chinese-language darknet: Elliptic is tracking close to 30 similar marketplaces, Robinson says, though he declined to name others in the midst of the company’s investigations.

Just as Telegram shows new signs of cracking down on that sprawling black market, Tether, too, has the ability to disrupt criminal use of its services. Unlike other more decentralized cryptocurrencies such as Bitcoin, Tether can freeze payments when it identifies bad actors. Yet it’s not clear to what degree Tether has taken measures to stop Chinese-language crypto scammers and others on Xinbi Guarantee and Huione Guarantee from using its currency.

When WIRED wrote to Tether to ask about its role in those black markets, the company responded in a statement that it encourages “firms like Elliptic and other blockchain intelligence providers to share critical data with law enforcement so we can act swiftly and in coordination.”

“We are not passive observers—we are active players in the global fight against financial crime,” the Tether statement continued. “If you’re considering using Tether for illicit purposes, think again: it is the most traceable asset in existence. We will identify you, and we will work to ensure you are brought to justice.”

Despite that promise—and Telegram’s new effort to remove Huione Guarantee and Xinbi Guarantee from its platform—both tools have already been used to facilitate tens of billions of dollars in theft and other black market deals, much of it occurring in plain sight. The two largely illegal and very public markets have been “remarkable for both the scale at which they’re operating and also the brazenness,” says Harvard’s Jacob Sims.

Given that brazenness and the massive criminal fortunes at stake, expect both markets to attempt a revival in some form—and plenty of competitors to try to take their place atop the Chinese-language crypto crime economy.

This story originally appeared on wired.com.

Wired.com is your essential daily guide to what’s next, delivering the most original and complete take you’ll find anywhere on innovation’s impact on technology, science, business and culture.

Incorporated in US: $8.4B money launderer for Chinese-speaking crypto scammers Read More »

US warns companies around the world to stay away from Huawei chips

Huawei, NVIDIA, syndication, Tech / DJ Henderson / May 14, 2025

President Donald Trump’s administration has taken a tougher stance on Chinese technology advances, warning companies around the world that using artificial intelligence chips made by Huawei could trigger criminal penalties for violating US export controls.

The commerce department issued guidance to clarify that Huawei’s Ascend processors were subject to export controls because they almost certainly contained, or were made with, US technology.

Its Bureau of Industry and Security, which oversees export controls, said on Tuesday it was taking a more stringent approach to foreign AI chips, including “issuing guidance that using Huawei Ascend chips anywhere in the world violates US export controls.”

But people familiar with the matter stressed that the bureau had not issued a new rule, but was making it clear to companies that Huawei chips are likely to have violated a measure that requires hard-to-get licenses to export US technology to the Chinese company.

“The guidance is not a new control, but rather a public confirmation of an interpretation that even the mere use anywhere by anyone of a Huawei-designed advanced computing [integrated circuit] would violate export control rules,” said Kevin Wolf, a veteran export control lawyer at Akin Gump.

The bureau said three Huawei Ascend chips—the 910B, 910C, and 910D—were subject to the regulations, noting that such chips are likely to have been “designed with certain US software or technology or produced with semiconductor manufacturing equipment that is the direct produce of certain US-origin software or technology, or both.”

The guidance comes as the US has become increasingly concerned at the speed at which Huawei has developed advanced chips and other AI hardware.

Huawei has begun delivering AI chip “clusters” to clients in China that it claims outperform leading US AI chipmaker Nvidia’s comparable product on key metrics such as total compute and memory. The system relies on a large number of 910C chips, which individually fall short of Nvidia’s most advanced offering but collectively deliver superior performance to a rival Nvidia cluster product.

US warns companies around the world to stay away from Huawei chips Read More »

Welcome to the age of paranoia as deepfakes and scams abound

AI, Deepfakes, Scams, syndication / Beth Washington / May 13, 2025

AI-driven fraud is leading people to verify every online interaction they have.

These days, when Nicole Yelland receives a meeting request from someone she doesn’t already know, she conducts a multistep background check before deciding whether to accept. Yelland, who works in public relations for a Detroit-based nonprofit, says she’ll run the person’s information through Spokeo, a personal data aggregator that she pays a monthly subscription fee to use. If the contact claims to speak Spanish, Yelland says, she will casually test their ability to understand and translate trickier phrases. If something doesn’t quite seem right, she’ll ask the person to join a Microsoft Teams call—with their camera on.

If Yelland sounds paranoid, that’s because she is. In January, before she started her current nonprofit role, Yelland says, she got roped into an elaborate scam targeting job seekers. “Now, I do the whole verification rigamarole any time someone reaches out to me,” she tells WIRED.

Digital imposter scams aren’t new; messaging platforms, social media sites, and dating apps have long been rife with fakery. In a time when remote work and distributed teams have become commonplace, professional communications channels are no longer safe, either. The same artificial intelligence tools that tech companies promise will boost worker productivity are also making it easier for criminals and fraudsters to construct fake personas in seconds.

On LinkedIn, it can be hard to distinguish a slightly touched-up headshot of a real person from a too-polished, AI-generated facsimile. Deepfake videos are getting so good that longtime email scammers are pivoting to impersonating people on live video calls. According to the US Federal Trade Commission, reports of job and employment related scams nearly tripled from 2020 to 2024, and actual losses from those scams have increased from $90 million to $500 million.

Yelland says the scammers that approached her back in January were impersonating a real company, one with a legitimate product. The “hiring manager” she corresponded with over email also seemed legit, even sharing a slide deck outlining the responsibilities of the role they were advertising. But during the first video interview, Yelland says, the scammers refused to turn their cameras on during a Microsoft Teams meeting and made unusual requests for detailed personal information, including her driver’s license number. Realizing she’d been duped, Yelland slammed her laptop shut.

These kinds of schemes have become so widespread that AI startups have emerged promising to detect other AI-enabled deepfakes, including GetReal Labs and Reality Defender. OpenAI CEO Sam Altman also runs an identity-verification startup called Tools for Humanity, which makes eye-scanning devices that capture a person’s biometric data, create a unique identifier for their identity, and store that information on the blockchain. The whole idea behind it is proving “personhood,” or that someone is a real human. (Lots of people working on blockchain technology say that blockchain is the solution for identity verification.)

But some corporate professionals are turning instead to old-fashioned social engineering techniques to verify every fishy-seeming interaction they have. Welcome to the Age of Paranoia, when someone might ask you to send them an email while you’re mid-conversation on the phone, slide into your Instagram DMs to ensure the LinkedIn message you sent was really from you, or request you text a selfie with a time stamp, proving you are who you claim to be. Some colleagues say they even share code words with each other, so they have a way to ensure they’re not being misled if an encounter feels off.

“What’s funny is, the lo-fi approach works,” says Daniel Goldman, a blockchain software engineer and former startup founder. Goldman says he began changing his own behavior after he heard a prominent figure in the crypto world had been convincingly deepfaked on a video call. “It put the fear of god in me,” he says. Afterward, he warned his family and friends that even if they hear what they believe is his voice or see him on a video call asking for something concrete—like money or an Internet password—they should hang up and email him first before doing anything.

Ken Schumacher, founder of the recruitment verification service Ropes, says he’s worked with hiring managers who ask job candidates rapid-fire questions about the city where they claim to live on their résumé, such as their favorite coffee shops and places to hang out. If the applicant is actually based in that geographic region, Schumacher says, they should be able to respond quickly with accurate details.

Another verification tactic some people use, Schumacher says, is what he calls the “phone camera trick.” If someone suspects the person they’re talking to over video chat is being deceitful, they can ask them to hold up their phone camera to show their laptop. The idea is to verify whether the individual may be running deepfake technology on their computer, obscuring their true identity or surroundings. But it’s safe to say this approach can also be off-putting: Honest job candidates may be hesitant to show off the inside of their homes or offices, or worry a hiring manager is trying to learn details about their personal lives.

“Everyone is on edge and wary of each other now,” Schumacher says.

While turning yourself into a human captcha may be a fairly effective approach to operational security, even the most paranoid admit these checks create an atmosphere of distrust before two parties have even had the chance to really connect. They can also be a huge time suck. “I feel like something’s gotta give,” Yelland says. “I’m wasting so much time at work just trying to figure out if people are real.”

Jessica Eise, an assistant professor studying climate change and social behavior at Indiana University Bloomington, says her research team has been forced to essentially become digital forensics experts due to the amount of fraudsters who respond to ads for paid virtual surveys. (Scammers aren’t as interested in the unpaid surveys, unsurprisingly.) For one of her research projects, which is federally funded, all of the online participants have to be over the age of 18 and living in the US.

“My team would check time stamps for when participants answered emails, and if the timing was suspicious, we could guess they might be in a different time zone,” Eise says. “Then we’d look for other clues we came to recognize, like certain formats of email address or incoherent demographic data.”

Eise says the amount of time her team spent screening people was “exorbitant” and that they’ve now shrunk the size of the cohort for each study and have turned to “snowball sampling,” or recruiting people they know personally to join their studies. The researchers are also handing out more physical flyers to solicit participants in person. “We care a lot about making sure that our data has integrity, that we’re studying who we say we’re trying to study,” she says. “I don’t think there’s an easy solution to this.”

Barring any widespread technical solution, a little common sense can go a long way in spotting bad actors. Yelland shared with me the slide deck that she received as part of the fake job pitch. At first glance, it seemed legit, but when she looked at it again, a few details stood out. The job promised to pay substantially more than the average salary for a similar role in her location and offered unlimited vacation time, generous paid parental leave, and fully covered health care benefits. In today’s job environment, that might have been the biggest tipoff of all that it was a scam.

This story originally appeared on wired.com.

Wired.com is your essential daily guide to what’s next, delivering the most original and complete take you’ll find anywhere on innovation’s impact on technology, science, business and culture.

Welcome to the age of paranoia as deepfakes and scams abound Read More »

A new era in cancer therapies is at hand

cancer, health, immunotherapy, syndication / DJ Henderson / May 12, 2025

New therapeutic strategies build on the success of immunotherapy.

In 2012, clinicians at the Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia treated Emily Whitehead, a 6-year-old with leukemia, with altered immune cells from her own body. At the time, the treatment was experimental, but it worked: The cells targeted the cancer and eradicated it. Thirteen years later, Whitehead is still cancer-free.

The modified cells, called CAR-T cells, are a form of immunotherapy, where doctors change parts of the immune system into cancer-attacking instruments. About five years after Whitehead’s treatment, the first CAR-T drugs were approved by the FDA and were heralded, along with immunotherapy more broadly, as one of the most promising modern cancer treatments. Today, there are seven FDA-approved CAR-T therapies, including the one used to treat Whitehead.

Since then, however, studies have linked CAR-T to fatal complications due to treatment toxicity, and the treatment has had a harder time addressing certain types of cancers, particularly solid tumors affecting the breast and pancreas, although some small clinical trials have been starting to show positive results for solid cancers. “After a decade, a decade and a half, we arrive at the point that there are patients who answer, most of the patients still do not answer,” said George Calin, a researcher at University of Texas MD Anderson Cancer Center.

Now experts say that new therapies are beginning to surpass challenges that previous treatments couldn’t, providing safer, more targeted delivery directly to tumors. These include drugs that contain radioactive substances, called radiopharmaceuticals, which are used to diagnose or treat cancer; medications that can influence the genes that spur or suppress tumor growth; and therapeutic cancer vaccines.

These approaches have shown promise in the lab, and researchers and companies are now conducting various stages of human clinical trials to explore their effectiveness. And some promising treatments have even gained approval by the Food and Drug Administration. The hope is that improving on these strategies will ultimately help treat even the most resistant types of cancer.

Despite researchers’ excitement for innovative treatments, there is rampant online misinformation and there are occasions in which companies have been found to tout and sell fake cures, said Kathrin Dvir, an oncologist and researcher at Moffitt Cancer Center.

But other scientists remain optimistic about the future of cancer research, Calin said: “All the time in science, you have to open the door with something new.”

Targeting is tough

Historically, one of the biggest challenges in cancer treatments has been the lack of specific targets. The typical standards of care — chemotherapy and radiation — kill off not only cancer cells, but also healthy ones. (This is one reason why cancer patients on these treatments experience hair loss, nausea, and other symptoms.) In recent years, scientists have thus aimed to develop therapies that only attack cancer cells, leaving the rest of the body unharmed.

One way to achieve this is through more precise targeting of the tumor. In one of these approaches, drugs act as a ferry, delivering radioactive molecules directly to the cancer. They do this by targeting proteins that are only present on the surface of specific tumors.

Take, for example, prostate cancer. Here, the cancerous cells are sensitive to radiation, so some researchers are working on drugs containing unstable chemical elements that emit radiation — radioactive isotopes, or radiopharmaceuticals — to facilitate imaging of the tumors and provide enough radiation to treat them.

Already, the field of radiopharmaceuticals has seen growth following successes like the brand name drugs Pluvicto for prostate cancer and Lutathera for neuroendocrine tumors, which reportedly offer improved quality of life compared to traditional treatments. Additionally, using radioisotopes for imaging could also allow researchers to diagnose and classify patients much better to provide personalized care, said Jason Lewis, a radiochemist at Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center. And while radiopharmaceutical therapy can have side effects, he added, it’s “designed to minimize radiation to healthy tissues.”

Other therapies, called antibody-drug conjugates, act similarly: They shuttle molecules that can kill the cancer cells via antibodies that can dock on tumors. About a dozen of such drugs have been approved by the FDA for various types of cancer.

There are also new vaccines to help the immune system ward off cancer, using the key approach behind a type of COVID-19 vaccine — mRNA technology. For example, one of the companies that developed one of the COVID-19 shots, BioNTech, is working on a vaccine called BNT116 designed to elicit immune reactions to treat a type of lung cancer, which is currently recruiting about 150 participants across the world to undergo safety testing.

mRNA therapeutic vaccines for cancer, which use messenger RNA as blueprint material so the body can create proteins that are unique to the tumor to help elicit an immune response, may offer several advantages. The shots can be personalized, for instance, to the patients’ own tumors, said Siow Ming Lee, an oncologist at University College London Hospitals and one of the lead researchers of the trial. Other vaccines are also in the works. “We are in this sort of new era now,” he said.

Another type of genetic molecule could also be a target to help treat cancer. Some RNAs, called microRNAs, can act on genes that are responsible for tumor growth. Researchers like Calin are developing small molecules that bind to cancer-related microRNAs, to turn them off and try to halt the disease’s spread.

With FDA approvals, human clinical trials underway and, with promising preclinical data for many of these therapies, the researchers who spoke to Undark said that the future appears bright. “We’re not just seeing these dramatic improvements in outcomes and survival for patients with some indications, but the quality of life,” Lewis said.

New approaches, new problems

As more of these latest cancer technologies do get approved for treatment, new approaches can bring new problems, experts say. For example, with radiotherapeutics, one big challenge is to source enough radioisotopes for the drugs, and have a specialized workforce to handle radioactivity, said Lewis. For microRNAS, it’s tricky to identify exactly which type to target for a particular cancer, Calin emphasized.

And there are also companies that are trying to capitalize on new, unproven technologies and drugs prematurely. The company ExThera Medical, for instance, has been charging patients tens of thousands of dollars for unproven therapies, according to a recent report by The New York Times.

“All over the world, there are many so-called new therapeutics that are not well-tested and not well-developed,” said Calin. Dvir encounters misinformation at her clinic almost daily, she said. “Maybe some of those have some data in the preclinical, in animal studies — it doesn’t mean that it works on the human because we need data before you expose people to those therapies.”

Although the FDA faces budget cuts, some of the researchers and clinicians that Undark spoke to insist that the agency will weed out bad science. If not, the clinicians that Undark spoke with said that they can also help guide patients toward evidence-based treatments.

Ultimately, researchers want to continue to improve these treatments to see if they might work in tandem. “I think the name of the game in the next five to 10 years is combinations,” said Dvir. Already, there are trials looking at precisely how using different approaches together might boost their ability to treat cancer, she adds. “We know that these drugs work in synergy. It’s just finding the right combination that is effective but not too toxic.”

This article was originally published on Undark. Read the original article.

A new era in cancer therapies is at hand Read More »

Industry groups are not happy about the imminent demise of Energy Star

Energy Star, EPA, Policy, syndication / Mike M. / May 10, 2025

One of Bush’s “points of light”

Energy Star was first established under President George H.W. Bush’s administration in 1992, the year of the Earth Summit in Rio, where nations around the world first joined in a framework convention to address climate change.

That international treaty, at Bush’s urging, relied on voluntary action rather than targets and timetables for reducing greenhouse gas emissions. Back at home, the Energy Star program, too, was a way to encourage, but not force, energy savings.

“It was kind of one of his thousand points of light,” Nadel said. “He didn’t want to do serious things about climate change, but a voluntary program to provide information and let consumers decide fit very nicely into his mindset.”

At first focused just on personal computers, monitors and printers, Energy Star expanded over the years to cover more than 50 home appliances, from heating and air conditioning systems to refrigerators, washers and dryers and lighting. Beginning in 1995, Energy Star certification expanded to include homes and commercial buildings.

A Republican-controlled Congress wrote Energy Star into law in a sprawling 2005 energy bill that President George W. Bush signed. It is not clear that the Trump administration can eliminate the Energy Star program, which is administered by both EPA and the Department of Energy, without a new act of Congress.

In a report to mark the 30th anniversary of Energy Star in 2022, the Biden administration estimated the program had achieved 4 billion metric tons of greenhouse gas reductions by helping consumers make energy-efficient choices. Nadel said the impact in the marketplace is visible, as companies increase the number of product choices that meet Energy Star standards whenever a new standard is adopted by EPA through a public notice and comment process.

The nonprofit Alliance to Save Energy has estimated that the Energy Star program costs the government about $32 million per year, while saving families more than $40 billion in annual energy costs.

Eliminating the program, Nadel said, “is million-wise and billion foolish.”

“It will not serve the American people”

Word of Energy Star’s potential demise began to circulate weeks ago. On March 20, a wide array of manufacturers and industry associations signed on to a letter to Zeldin, urging him to maintain the Energy Star program.

Industry groups are not happy about the imminent demise of Energy Star Read More »

Europe launches program to lure scientists away from the US

European Union, Science, science cuts, syndication, Trump / DJ Henderson / May 9, 2025

At the same time, international interest in working in the United States has declined significantly. During the first quarter of the year, applications from scientists from Canada, China, and Europe to US research centers fell by 13 percent, 39 percent, and 41 percent, respectively.

Against this backdrop, European institutions have intensified their efforts to attract US talent. Aix-Marseille University, in France, recently launched A Safe Place for Science, a program aimed at hosting US researchers dismissed, censored, or limited by Trump’s policies. This project is backed with an investment of approximately €15 million.

Along the same lines, the Max Planck Society in Germany has announced the creation of the Max Planck Transatlantic Program, whose purpose is to establish joint research centers with US institutions. “Outstanding investigators who have to leave the US, we will consider for director positions,” the society’s director Patrick Cramer said in a speech discussing the program.

Spain seeks a leading role

Juan Cruz Cigudosa, Spain’s secretary of state for science, innovation, and universities, has stressed that Spain is also actively involved in attracting global scientific talent, and is prioritizing areas such as quantum biotechnology, artificial intelligence, advanced materials, and semiconductors, as well as anything that strengthens the country’s technological sovereignty.

To achieve this, the government of Pedro Sánchez has strengthened existing programs. The ATRAE program—which aims to entice established researchers into bringing their work to Spain—has been reinforced with €45 million to recruit scientists who are leaders in strategic fields, with a special focus on US experts who feel “looked down upon.” This program is offering additional funding of €200,000 euros per project to those selected from the United States.

Similarly, the Ramón y Cajal program—created 25 years ago to further the careers of young scientists—has increased its funding by 150 percent since 2018, allowing for 500 researchers to be funded per year, of which 30 percent are foreigners.

“We are going to intensify efforts to attract talent from the United States. We want them to come to do the best science possible, free of ideological restrictions. Scientific and technological knowledge make us a better country, because it generates shared prosperity and a vision of the future,” said Cigudosa in a statement to the Spanish international news agency EFE after the announcement of the Choose Europe for Science program.

This story originally appeared on WIRED en Español and has been translated from Spanish.

Europe launches program to lure scientists away from the US Read More »

Trump’s NIH ignored court order, cut research grants anyway

doge, health, NIH, syndication, Trump, whistleblower / DJ Henderson / May 8, 2025

Officials testified that DOGE was directly involved in hundreds of grant terminations.

For more than two months, the Trump administration has been subject to a federal court order stopping it from cutting funding related to gender identity and the provision of gender-affirming care in response to President Donald Trump’s executive orders.

Lawyers for the federal government have repeatedly claimed in court filings that the administration has been complying with the order.

But new whistleblower records submitted in a lawsuit led by the Washington state attorney general appear to contradict the claim.

Nearly two weeks after the court’s preliminary injunction was issued, the National Institutes of Health’s then-acting head, Dr. Matthew J. Memoli, drafted a memo that details how the agency, in response to Trump’s executive orders, cut funding for research grants that “promote or inculcate gender ideology.” An internal spreadsheet of terminated NIH grants also references “gender ideology” and lists the number associated with Trump’s executive order as the reason for the termination of more than a half dozen research grants.

The Washington attorney general’s allegation that the Trump administration violated a court order comes as the country lurches toward a constitutional crisis amid accusations that the executive branch has defied or ignored court orders in several other cases. In the most high-profile case so far, the administration has yet to comply with a federal judge’s order, upheld unanimously by the Supreme Court, requiring it to “facilitate” the return of Kilmar Armando Abrego Garcia, who was mistakenly deported to El Salvador in March.

The records filed in the NIH-related lawsuit last week also reveal for the first time the enormous scope of the administration’s changes to the agency, which has been subject to massive layoffs and research cuts to align it with the president’s political priorities.

Other documents filed in the case raise questions concerning a key claim the administration has made about how it is restructuring federal agencies—that the Department of Government Efficiency has limited authority, acting mostly as an advisory body that consults on what to cut. However, in depositions filed in the case last week, two NIH officials testified that DOGE itself gave directions in hundreds of grant terminations.

The lawsuit offers an unprecedented view into the termination of more than 600 grants at the NIH over the past two months. Many of the canceled grants appear to have focused on subjects that the administration claims are unscientific or that the agency should no longer focus on under new priorities, such as gender identity, vaccine hesitancy, and diversity, equity, and inclusion. Grants related to research in China have also been cut, and climate change projects are under scrutiny.

Andrew G. Nixon, the director of communications for the Department of Health and Human Services, the NIH’s parent agency, told ProPublica in an email that the grant terminations directly followed the president’s executive orders and that the NIH’s actions were based on policy and scientific priorities, not political interference.

“The cuts are essential to refocus NIH on key public health priorities, like the chronic disease epidemic,” he said. Nixon also told ProPublica that its questions related to the lawsuit “solely fit a partisan narrative”; he did not respond to specific questions about the preliminary injunction, the administration’s compliance with the order or the involvement of DOGE in the grant termination process. The White House did not respond to ProPublica’s questions.

Mike Faulk, the deputy communications director for the Washington state attorney general’s office, told ProPublica in an email that the administration “appears to have used DOGE in this instance to keep career NIH officials in the dark about what was happening and why.”

“While claiming to be transparent, DOGE has actively hidden its activities and its true motivations,” he said. “Our office will use every tool we have to uncover the truth about why these grants were terminated.”

Since Trump took office in January, the administration has provided limited insight into why it chose to terminate scientific and medical grants.

That decision-making process has been largely opaque, until now.

Washington fights to overturn grant termination

In February, Washington state—joined by Minnesota, Oregon, Colorado, and three physicians—sued the administration after it threatened to enforce its executive orders by withholding federal research grants from institutions that provided gender-affirming services or promoted “gender ideology.” Within weeks, a federal judge issued an injunction limiting the administration from fully enforcing the orders in the four states that are party to the suit.

The same day as the injunction, however, the NIH terminated a research grant to Seattle Children’s Hospital to develop and study an online education tool designed to reduce the risk of violence, mental health disorders and sexually transmitted infections among transgender youth, according to records filed in the court case. The NIH stated that it was the agency’s policy not to “prioritize” such studies on gender identity.

“Research programs based on gender identity are often unscientific, have little identifiable return on investment, and do nothing to enhance the health of many Americans,” the notice stated, without citing any scientific evidence for its claims. The NIH sent another notice reiterating the termination four days later.

The Washington attorney general’s office requested the termination be withdrawn, citing the injunction. But the administration refused, claiming that it was in compliance as the termination was based on NIH’s own authority and grant policy and was not enforcing any executive order.

The Washington attorney general asked the judge to hold the administration in contempt for violating the injunction. While the request was denied, the court granted an expedited discovery process to better assess whether the administration had breached the injunction. That process would have required the administration to quickly turn over internal documents relating to the termination. In response, the administration reinstated the grant for Seattle Children’s Hospital and declared the discovery process moot, or no longer relevant. However, US District Judge Lauren J. King, who was appointed by former President Joseph Biden, permitted it to continue.

Whistleblower documents reveal sweeping changes at NIH

In recent months, whistleblowers have made the plaintiffs in the lawsuit aware of internal records that more closely connect the grant terminations to the administration’s executive orders.

In an internal spreadsheet of dozens of grants marked for cancellation at an NIH institute, the stated reason for termination for several was “gender ideology (EA 14168),” including the grant to Seattle Children’s Hospital.

The rationale appears to reference Executive Order 14168, which banned using federal funds to “promote gender ideology,” again seeming to conflict with the administration’s stance that the termination was not based on the executive orders. The termination dates of the grants, according to the spreadsheet, were after the injunction went into effect.

Another internal document, which provides extraordinary insight into the administration’s efforts to reshape the NIH, also states the executive order was the impetus for grant terminations.

In the March 11 memo from Memoli, the NIH cataloged all actions that the agency had taken thus far to align with the president’s executive orders. In a section detailing the steps taken to implement the “gender ideology” executive order, one of the 44 actions listed was the termination of active grants.

“NIH is currently reviewing all active grants and supplements to determine if they promote gender ideology and will take action as appropriate,” the memo stated, noting that the process was in progress.

While the administration has said in court filings that it is following the judge’s injunction order, the Washington state attorney general’s office told ProPublica that it disagreed.

“Their claim to have complied with the preliminary injunction is almost laughable,” said Faulk, the office’s deputy communications director. “The Trump administration is playing games with no apparent respect for the rule of law.”

Depositions reveal DOGE links

In depositions conducted last month as part of the lawsuit, the testimony of two NIH officials also raised questions about why the research grants were terminated and how DOGE was involved.

Liza Bundesen, who was the deputy director of the agency’s extramural research office, testified that she first learned of the grant terminations on February 28 from a DOGE team member, Rachel Riley. Bundesen said she was invited into a Microsoft Teams video call, where Riley introduced herself as being part of DOGE and working with the Department of Health and Human Services.

Riley, a former consultant for McKinsey & Co., joined HHS on January 27, according to court filings in a separate lawsuit, and has reportedly served as the DOGE point person at the NIH.

The executive order detailing DOGE’s responsibilities describes the cost-cutting team as advisers that consult agency heads on the termination of contracts and grants. No language in the orders gives the DOGE team members the authority to direct the cancellation of grants or contracts. However, the depositions portray Riley as giving directions on how to conduct the terminations.

“She informed me that a number of grants will need to be terminated,” Bundesen testified, adding that she was told that they needed to be terminated by the end of the day. “I did not ask what, you know, what grants because I just literally was a little bit confused and caught off guard.”

Bundesen said she then received an email from Memoli, the NIH acting director, with a spreadsheet listing the grants that needed to be canceled and a template letter for notifying researchers of the terminations.

“The template had boilerplate language that could then be modified for the different circumstances, the different buckets of grants that were to be terminated,” she said. “The categories were DEI, research in China and transgender or gender ideology.”

Bundesen forwarded the email with the spreadsheet to Michelle Bulls, who directs the agency’s Office of Policy for Extramural Research Administration. Bundesen resigned from the NIH a week later, on March 7, citing “untenable” working conditions.

“I was given directives to implement with very short turnaround times, often close of business or maybe within the next hour,” she testified. “I was not offered the opportunity to provide feedback or really ask for clarification.”

Bulls confirmed in her own deposition that the termination list and letter template originally came from Riley. When Bulls started receiving the lists, she said she did what she was told. “I just followed the directive,” she said. “The language in the letters were provided so I didn’t question.”

Bulls said she didn’t write any of the letters herself and just signed her name to them. She also said she was not aware whether anyone had assessed the grants’ scientific merit or whether they met agency criteria. The grant terminations related to gender identity did not stem from an independent agency policy, she testified, appearing to contradict the administration’s assertion that they were based on the agency’s own authority and grant policy.

As of April 3, Bulls said she had received more than five lists of grants that needed to be terminated, amounting to “somewhere between five hundred and a thousand” grants.

Most grant recipients endure a rigorous vetting process, which can involve multiple stages of peer review before approval, and before this year, Bulls testified that grant terminations at the NIH have historically been rare. There are generally two main types of terminations, she said, for noncompliance or based on mutual agreement. Bulls said that she has been “generally involved in noncompliance discussions” and since she became the director of the office in 2012, there had been fewer than five such terminations.

In addition to the termination letters, Bulls said she relied on the template language provided by Riley to draft guidance to inform the 27 centers and institutes at the NIH what the agency’s new priorities were to help them scrutinize their own research portfolios.

Following the depositions, the Washington state attorney general’s office said that the federal government has refused to respond to its discovery requests. It has filed a motion to compel the government to respond, which is pending.

Riley, Bundesen, Bulls, and Memoli did not reply to ProPublica’s requests for comment.

While the administration did not answer ProPublica’s questions about DOGE and its involvement in the grant terminations, last week in its budget blueprint, it generally justified its proposed cuts at the NIH with claims that the agency had “wasteful spending,” conducted “risky research” and promoted “dangerous ideologies that undermine public health.”

“NIH has grown too big and unfocused,” the White House claimed in its fiscal plan, adding that the agency’s research should “align with the President’s priorities to address chronic disease and other epidemics, implementing all executive orders and eliminating research on climate change, radical gender ideology, and divisive racialism.”

Jeremy Berg, who led the National Institute of General Medical Sciences at the NIH from 2003 to 2011, told ProPublica that the administration’s assessment of the institution was “not fair and not based on any substantial analysis or evidence,” and the proposed cuts “would be absolutely devastating to NIH and to biomedical research in the United States.”

“It is profoundly distressing to see this great institution being reduced to a lawless, politicized organization without much focus on its actual mission,” he said.

Trump’s NIH ignored court order, cut research grants anyway Read More »

Dangerous clear-air turbulence is worsening due to global warming

airlines, climate change, flight, jet stream, Science, syndication / Kelly Newman / May 7, 2025

“Global warming is faster at the poles,” Faranda said, “and it’s melting ice and it’s also warming differently in oceans and on continents.”

As global warming jars climatic patterns, it affects the jet streams, he said.

Williams, the University of Reading scientist, was “the first to understand that if the jet stream is affected, then turbulence in the jet stream is affected, and therefore flight operations are affected,” Faranda said.

In his EGU presentation, Williams said it’s important to look at vertical wind shear because the signal in the data is much stronger compared to the noise.

“Why do we care about stronger wind shear? Well, of course, it’s because we fly through it,” he said, showing a photo of a grounded jet plane that lost an engine in severe clear-air turbulence. The data shows there has been a 55 percent increase of severe air turbulence since the 1970s, he added.

Climate models show that, under the most realistic greenhouse gas emissions scenarios, a “hotspot in the tropical upper troposphere will continue to grow, which means an even stronger midlatitude temperature gradient,” he said.

That hotspot in the upper troposphere is an area of amplified warming resulting partly from water vapor feedbacks, as moist, hot air steams off the tropical oceans. That heat bulge is increasing the temperature gradient in areas near some of the busiest flight paths, including transatlantic routes.

If rapid warming continues, Williams said, studies show vertical wind shear could increase 29 percent by 2100, or 17 percent if global emissions are halved by mid-century and keep dropping.

“This, of course, means a lot more turbulence in not that many years from now,” he said.

Faranda added that his own experiences and research on clear-air turbulence won’t keep him from flying. New measurements by weather instruments and greater awareness of the potential for such turbulence will help keep most flights safe, and changes to wing design and plane construction could make them less vulnerable, he added.

“In principle, you can fly through these areas without consequences in most cases,” Faranda said. But with projections for more intense and frequent turbulence, it’s important to maintain observation programs, he added.

“With the new global political situation, there is a lot of talk of reducing instruments for monitoring the weather and the climate, and this would produce worse weather forecasts,” he said. And fewer weather observations will likely lead to shakier flights.

This story originally appeared on Inside Climate News.

Dangerous clear-air turbulence is worsening due to global warming Read More »

Data centers say Trump’s crackdown on renewables bad for business, AI

AI, Biz & IT, data centers, green energy, syndication / Mike M. / May 6, 2025

Although big participants in the technology industry may be able to lobby the administration to “loosen up” restrictions on new power sources, small to medium-sized players were in a “holding pattern” as they waited to see if permitting obstacles and tariffs on renewables equipment were lifted, said Ninan.

“On average, [operators] are most likely going to try to find ways of absorbing additional costs and going to dirtier sources,” he said.

Amazon, which is the largest corporate purchaser of renewable energy globally, said carbon-free energy must remain an important part of the energy mix to meet surging demand for power, keep costs down, and hit climate goals.

“Renewable energy can often be less expensive than alternatives because there’s no fuel to purchase. Some of the purchasing agreements we have signed historically were ‘no brainers’ because they reduced our power costs,” said Kevin Miller, vice-president of Global Data Centers at Amazon Web Services.

Efforts by state and local governments to stymie renewables could also hit the sector. In Texas—the third-largest US data center market after Virginia, according to S&P Global Market Intelligence—bills are being debated that increase regulation on solar and wind projects.

“We have a huge opportunity in front of us with these data centers,” said Doug Lewin, president of Stoic Energy. “Virginia can only take so many, and you can build faster here, but any of these bills passing would kill that in the crib.”

The renewables crackdown will make it harder for “hyperscale” data centers run by companies such as Equinix, Microsoft, Google, and Meta to offset their emissions and invest in renewable energy sources.

“Demand [for renewables] has reached an all-time high,” said Christopher Wellise, sustainability vice-president at Equinix. “So when you couple that with the additional constraints, there could be some near to midterm challenges.”

Additional reporting by Jamie Smyth.

Data centers say Trump’s crackdown on renewables bad for business, AI Read More »

On cusp of storm season, NOAA funding cuts put hurricane forecasting at risk

National Hurricane Center, NHC, NOAA, Science, syndication, Trump / DJ Henderson / May 5, 2025

Tropical cyclone track forecasts are 75 percent more accurate than they were in 1990.

The National Hurricane Center’s forecasts in 2024 were its most accurate on record, from its one-day forecasts, as tropical cyclones neared the coast, to its forecasts five days into the future, when storms were only beginning to come together.

Thanks to federally funded research, forecasts of tropical cyclone tracks today are up to 75 percent more accurate than they were in 1990. A National Hurricane Center forecast three days out today is about as accurate as a one-day forecast in 2002, giving people in the storm’s path more time to prepare and reducing the size of evacuations.

Accuracy will be crucial again in 2025, as meteorologists predict another active Atlantic hurricane season, which runs from June 1 to November 30.

Yet, cuts in staffing and threats to funding at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration—which includes the National Hurricane Center and National Weather Service—are diminishing operations that forecasters rely on.

error trend for Atlantic Basin for 1990-2024 — National Hurricane Center Official Track Error Trend for the Atlantic Basin between 1990 and 2024. Credit: National Hurricane Center

I am a meteorologist who studies lightning in hurricanes and helps train other meteorologists to monitor and forecast tropical cyclones. Here are three of the essential components of weather forecasting that have been targeted for cuts to funding and staff at NOAA.

Tracking the wind

To understand how a hurricane is likely to behave, forecasters need to know what’s going on in the atmosphere far from the Atlantic and Gulf coasts.

Hurricanes are steered by the winds around them. Wind patterns detected today over the Rocky Mountains and Great Plains—places like Colorado, Wyoming, Nebraska, and South Dakota—give forecasters clues to the winds that will be likely along the Gulf and Atlantic coasts in the days ahead.

Satellites can’t take direct measurements, so to measure these winds, scientists rely on weather balloons. That data is essential both for forecasts and to calibrate the complicated formulas forecasters use to make estimates from satellite data.

However, in early 2025, the Trump administration terminated or suspended weather balloon launches at more than a dozen locations.

That move and other cuts and threatened cuts at NOAA have raised red flags for forecasters across the country and around the world.

Forecasters everywhere, from TV to private companies, rely on NOAA’s data to do their jobs. Much of that data would be extremely expensive if not impossible to replicate.

Under normal circumstances, weather balloons are released from around 900 locations around the world at 8 am and 8 pm Eastern time every day. While the loss of just 12 of these profiles may not seem significant, small amounts of missing data can lead to big forecast errors. This is an example of chaos theory, more popularly known as the butterfly effect.

The balloons carry a small instrument called a radiosonde, which records data as it rises from the surface of the Earth to around 120,000 feet above ground. The radiosonde acts like an all-in-one weather station, beaming back details of the temperature, relative humidity, wind speed and direction, and air pressure every 15 feet through its flight.

Together, all these measurements help meteorologists interpret the atmosphere overhead and feed into computer models used to help forecast weather around the country, including hurricanes.

Hurricane Hunters

For more than 80 years, scientists have been flying planes into hurricanes to measure each storm’s strength and help forecast its path and potential for damage.

Known as “Hurricane Hunters,” these crews from the US Air Force Reserve and NOAA routinely conduct reconnaissance missions throughout hurricane season using a variety of instruments. Similar to weather balloons, these flights are making measurements that satellites can’t.

Hurricane Hunters use Doppler radar to gauge how the wind is blowing and LiDAR to measure temperature and humidity changes. They drop probes to measure the ocean temperature down several hundred feet to tell how much warm water might be there to fuel the storm.

illustration showing hurricane season missions flown by NOAA — A summary of 2024 Atlantic hurricane season missions flown by NOAA Hurricane Hunters shows the types of equipment used. Credit: Atlantic Oceanographic and Meteorological Laboratory

They also release 20 to 30 dropsondes, measuring devices with parachutes. As the dropsondes fall through the storm, they transmit data about the temperature, humidity, wind speed and direction, and air pressure every 15 feet or so from the plane to the ocean.

Dropsondes from Hurricane Hunter flights are the only way to directly measure what is occurring inside the storm. Although satellites and radars can see inside hurricanes, these are indirect measurements that do not have the fine-scale resolution of dropsonde data.

That data tells National Hurricane Center forecasters how intense the storm is and whether the atmosphere around the storm is favorable for strengthening. Dropsonde data also helps computer models forecast the track and intensity of storms days into the future.

Two NOAA Hurricane Hunter flight directors were laid off in February 2025, leaving only six, when 10 are preferred. Directors are the flight meteorologists aboard each flight who oversee operations and ensure the planes stay away from the most dangerous conditions.

Having fewer directors limits the number of flights that can be sent out during busy times when Hurricane Hunters are monitoring multiple storms. And that would limit the accurate data the National Hurricane Center would have for forecasting storms.

Eyes in the sky

Weather satellites that monitor tropical storms from space provide continuous views of each storm’s track and intensity changes. The equipment on these satellites and software used to analyze it make increasingly accurate hurricane forecasts possible. Much of that equipment is developed by federally funded researchers.

For example, the Cooperative Institutes in Wisconsin and Colorado have developed software and methods that help meteorologists better understand the current state of tropical cyclones and forecast future intensity when aircraft reconnaissance isn’t immediately available.

Picture of weather satellite — The Jason 3 satellite, illustrated here, is one of several satellites NOAA uses during hurricane season. The satellite is a partnership among NOAA, NASA, and their European counterparts. Credit: NOAA

Forecasting rapid intensification is one of the great challenges for hurricane scientists. It’s the dangerous shift when a tropical cyclone’s wind speeds jump by at least 35 mph (56 kilometers per hour) in 24 hours.

For example, in 2018, Hurricane Michael’s rapid intensification caught the Florida Panhandle by surprise. The Category 5 storm caused billions of dollars in damage across the region, including at Tyndall Air Force Base, where several F-22 Stealth Fighters were still in hangars.

Under the federal budget proposal details released so far, including a draft of agencies’ budget plans marked up by Trump’s Office of Management and Budget, known as the passback, there is no funding for Cooperative Institutes. There is also no funding for aircraft recapitalization. A 2022 NOAA plan sought to purchase up to six new aircraft that would be used by Hurricane Hunters.

The passback budget also cut funding for some technology from future satellites, including lightning mappers that are used in hurricane intensity forecasting and to warn airplanes of risks.

It only takes one

Tropical storms and hurricanes can have devastating effects, as Hurricanes Helene and Milton reminded the country in 2024. These storms, while well forecast, resulted in billions of dollars of damage and hundreds of fatalities.

The US has been facing more intense storms, and the coastal population and value of property in harm’s way are growing. As five former directors of the National Weather Service wrote in an open letter, cutting funding and staff from NOAA’s work that is improving forecasting and warnings ultimately threatens to leave more lives at risk.

Chris Vagasky is Meteorologist and Research Program Manager at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

The Conversation is an independent source of news and views, sourced from the academic and research community. Our team of editors work with these experts to share their knowledge with the wider public. Our aim is to allow for better understanding of current affairs and complex issues, and hopefully improve the quality of public discourse on them.

On cusp of storm season, NOAA funding cuts put hurricane forecasting at risk Read More »

A DOGE recruiter is staffing a project to deploy AI agents across the US government

AI, doge, palantir, Policy, syndication, us doge service / Mike M. / May 4, 2025

“does it still require Kremlin oversight?

A startup founder said that AI agents could do the work of tens of thousands of government employees.

An aide sets up a poster depicting the logo for the DOGE Caucus before a news conference in Washington, DC. Credit: Andrew Harnik/Getty Images

A young entrepreneur who was among the earliest known recruiters for Elon Musk’s so-called Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) has a new, related gig—and he’s hiring. Anthony Jancso, cofounder of AcclerateX, a government tech startup, is looking for technologists to work on a project that aims to have artificial intelligence perform tasks that are currently the responsibility of tens of thousands of federal workers.

Jancso, a former Palantir employee, wrote in a Slack with about 2000 Palantir alumni in it that he’s hiring for a “DOGE orthogonal project to design benchmarks and deploy AI agents across live workflows in federal agencies,” according to an April 21 post reviewed by WIRED. Agents are programs that can perform work autonomously.

We’ve identified over 300 roles with almost full-process standardization, freeing up at least 70k FTEs for higher-impact work over the next year,” he continued, essentially claiming that tens of thousands of federal employees could see many aspects of their job automated and replaced by these AI agents. Workers for the project, he wrote, would be based on site in Washington, DC, and would not require a security clearance; it isn’t clear for whom they would work. Palantir did not respond to requests for comment.

The post was not well received. Eight people reacted with clown face emojis, three reacted with a custom emoji of a man licking a boot, two reacted with custom emoji of Joaquin Phoenix giving a thumbs down in the movie Gladiator, and three reacted with a custom emoji with the word “Fascist.” Three responded with a heart emoji.

“DOGE does not seem interested in finding ‘higher impact work’ for federal employees,” one person said in a comment that received 11 heart reactions. “You’re complicit in firing 70k federal employees and replacing them with shitty autocorrect.”

“Tbf we’re all going to be replaced with shitty autocorrect (written by chatgpt),” another person commented, which received one “+1” reaction.

“How ‘DOGE orthogonal’ is it? Like, does it still require Kremlin oversight?” another person said in a comment that received five reactions with a fire emoji. “Or do they just use your credentials to log in later?”

AccelerateX was originally called AccelerateSF, which VentureBeat reported in 2023 had received support from OpenAI and Anthropic. In its earliest incarnation, AccelerateSF hosted a hackathon for AI developers aimed at using the technology to solve San Francisco’s social problems. According to a 2023 Mission Local story, for instance, Jancso proposed that using large language models to help businesses fill out permit forms to streamline the construction paperwork process might help drive down housing prices. (OpenAI did not respond to a request for comment. Anthropic spokesperson Danielle Ghiglieri tells WIRED that the company “never invested in AccelerateX/SF,” but did sponsor a hackathon AccelerateSF hosted in 2023 by providing free access to its API usage at a time when its Claude API “was still in beta.”)

In 2024, the mission pivoted, with the venture becoming known as AccelerateX. In a post on X announcing the change, the company posted, “Outdated tech is dragging down the US Government. Legacy vendors sell broken systems at increasingly steep prices. This hurts every American citizen.” AccelerateX did not respond to a request for comment.

According to sources with direct knowledge, Jancso disclosed that AccelerateX had signed a partnership agreement with Palantir in 2024. According to the LinkedIn of someone described as one of AccelerateX’s cofounders, Rachel Yee, the company looks to have received funding from OpenAI’s Converge 2 Accelerator. Another of AccelerateSF’s cofounders, Kay Sorin, now works for OpenAI, having joined the company several months after that hackathon. Sorin and Yee did not respond to requests for comment.

Jancso’s cofounder, Jordan Wick, a former Waymo engineer, has been an active member of DOGE, appearing at several agencies over the past few months, including the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, National Labor Relations Board, the Department of Labor, and the Department of Education. In 2023, Jancso attended a hackathon hosted by ScaleAI; WIRED found that another DOGE member, Ethan Shaotran, also attended the same hackathon.

Since its creation in the first days of the second Trump administration, DOGE has pushed the use of AI across agencies, even as it has sought to cut tens of thousands of federal jobs. At the Department of Veterans Affairs, a DOGE associate suggested using AI to write code for the agency’s website; at the General Services Administration, DOGE has rolled out the GSAi chatbot; the group has sought to automate the process of firing government employees with a tool called AutoRIF; and a DOGE operative at the Department of Housing and Urban Development is using AI tools to examine and propose changes to regulations. But experts say that deploying AI agents to do the work of 70,000 people would be tricky if not impossible.

A federal employee with knowledge of government contracting, who spoke to WIRED on the condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to speak to the press, says, “A lot of agencies have procedures that can differ widely based on their own rules and regulations, and so deploying AI agents across agencies at scale would likely be very difficult.”

Oren Etzioni, cofounder of the AI startup Vercept, says that while AI agents can be good at doing some things—like using an internet browser to conduct research—their outputs can still vary widely and be highly unreliable. For instance, customer service AI agents have invented nonexistent policies when trying to address user concerns. Even research, he says, requires a human to actually make sure what the AI is spitting out is correct.

“We want our government to be something that we can rely on, as opposed to something that is on the absolute bleeding edge,” says Etzioni. “We don’t need it to be bureaucratic and slow, but if corporations haven’t adopted this yet, is the government really where we want to be experimenting with the cutting edge AI?”

Etzioni says that AI agents are also not great 1-1 fits for job replacements. Rather, AI is able to do certain tasks or make others more efficient, but the idea that the technology could do the jobs of 70,000 employees would not be possible. “Unless you’re using funny math,” he says, “no way.”

Jancso, first identified by WIRED in February, was one of the earliest recruiters for DOGE in the months before Donald Trump was inaugurated. In December, Jancso, who sources told WIRED said he had been recruited by Steve Davis, president of the Musk-founded Boring Company and a current member of DOGE, used the Palantir alumni group to recruit DOGE members. On December 2nd, 2024, he wrote, “I’m helping Elon’s team find tech talent for the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) in the new admin. This is a historic opportunity to build an efficient government, and to cut the federal budget by 1/3. If you’re interested in playing a role in this mission, please reach out in the next few days.”

According to one source at SpaceX, who asked to remain anonymous as they are not authorized to speak to the press, Jancso appeared to be one of the DOGE members who worked out of the company’s DC office in the days before inauguration along with several other people who would constitute some of DOGE’s earliest members. SpaceX did not respond to a request for comment.

Palantir was cofounded by Peter Thiel, a billionaire and longtime Trump supporter with close ties to Musk. Palantir, which provides data analytics tools to several government agencies including the Department of Defense and the Department of Homeland Security, has received billions of dollars in government contracts. During the second Trump administration, the company has been involved in helping to build a “mega API” to connect data from the Internal Revenue Service to other government agencies, and is working with Immigration and Customs Enforcement to create a massive surveillance platform to identify immigrants to target for deportation.

This story originally appeared at WIRED.com.

Wired.com is your essential daily guide to what’s next, delivering the most original and complete take you’ll find anywhere on innovation’s impact on technology, science, business and culture.

A DOGE recruiter is staffing a project to deploy AI agents across the US government Read More »