Outrage grows as CDC reportedly poised to fund "unethical" vaccine trial

Outrage grows as CDC reportedly poised to fund "unethical" vaccine trial

fivenewscrypto    octobre 11, 2026   

Outrage has erupted among health experts over news that the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention is still eager to fund a widely condemned vaccine trial that would expose newborns in Guinea-Bissau to hepatitis B, putting them at high risk of a lifelong infection, which can lead to liver cirrhosis, liver cancer, and premature death.

The trial was suspended in January after its unethical design came to light and drew international outcry. Although the trial is still halted, staff of the CDC director's office told the agency's budget office in late September to set aside $1.6 million to fund the trial, according to a report by Rolling Stone. The money was to be pulled from funding for the CDC's global health security programs, which might otherwise go toward efforts like combating the Ebola outbreak currently raging in the Democratic Republic of the Congo.

The Department of Health and Human Services, which oversees the CDC, did not respond to a request for comment from Ars Technica.

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PC shipments fall 20.1 percent in “sharpest decline” since Q1 2023

PC shipments fall 20.1 percent in “sharpest decline” since Q1 2023

fivenewscrypto    octobre 11, 2026   

PC shipments saw a steep drop of about 20 percent in Q3 2026, analysts reported this week.

The industry saw its “sharpest decline since “Q1 2023," Omdia said in an announcement toady. Global shipments of laptops, desktops, and workstations fell 21.2 percent year over year (YoY) to 58.1 million devices, the analyst said.

Desktop PC shipments (including desktop workstations) decreased 23.5 percent to 11.7 million units, and laptop shipments (including laptop workstations) declined 20.6 percent to 46.4 million, per Omdia.

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AI disqualification yields new Nikon Small World in Motion winner

AI disqualification yields new Nikon Small World in Motion winner

fivenewscrypto    octobre 11, 2026   

Credit: Nguyen Nam Nhat.

Last month we covered the winner of Nikon's Small World in Motion video: Ning Xu of Tsinghua University in China, whose video captured tiny cilia beating in the airways of a child with a rare respiratory disorder. But allegations surfaced about Xu's use of AI while making the video. Nikon launched an investigation and concluded that Xu's entry did not comply with competition rules. The new winner is Nguyen Nam Nhat of Vietnam with a video of a tiny roundworm and a single-celled organism (above).

According to a BBC report, some researchers expressed concern that Xu's video had structural abnormalities and that cell features appeared and disappeared in a way one would not see in actual cellular biology. Others spotted what looked like AI watermarks embedded within the source files. Xu said he used AI “to distinguish and visualize features in the reconstructed grayscale images”; however, he denied that AI was used "to generate the experimental movie, the cilia, or their motion.”

Founded in 2011, the Nikon Small World in Motion competition is a spinoff of the company’s Small World Photomicrography Competition, which has been around since 1974. Both are meant “to showcase the beauty and complexity of things seen through the light microscope”—one through still photographs, the other through photovideography, taking advantage of all the technological advances that now allow users to make movies or time-lapse images through the microscope.

The other winners also moved up a notch with Xu's disqualification. Benedikt Pleyer of Bavaria, Germany, placed second with a video of jellyfish larvae suspended in water droplets; Andrew Moore of Howard Hughes Medical Institute in the US placed third with a video of synchronized cell division in neighboring cells; Patrick Hickey of Hypha Research Ltd. in Edinburgh, Scotland, placed fourth with a video of the dynamics of mitochondria and chloroplasts in Turtle Vine leaf cells; and Igor Adameyko placed fifth with a video of a tiny, colorful sea slug (Cyerce kikutarobabai) on the move.

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Your artwork could be featured in the next Debian release

Your artwork could be featured in the next Debian release

fivenewscrypto    octobre 11, 2026   

The Debian Linux project has opened a call for community artwork submissions ahead of the release of the upcoming Forky (Debian 14). If you think you've got the artistic chops, your art could appear on the boot screens, login prompts, and desktop wallpapers of millions of users. The submission deadline is November 26.

Continuing Debian's community-driven ethos, the artwork submission process mirrors that of previous releases. The artwork must feel distinctively "Debian," integrate cleanly without the need for core software patching, and remain visually appealing for the long term.

Elise Couper's "Ceratopsian" theme was chosen as the winning default for Debian 13 Trixie. For anyone who might not be up on the latest from the Toy Story franchise, the release names echo character names from the animated films. Trixie was a triceratops introduced in Toy Story 3, hence the "Ceratopsian" wink in the winning submission. It makes sense that the next version of Debian continues this trend with Forky, a character introduced in the franchise's fourth entry. The Debian team cautions against overly busy designs that may cause user fatigue, but if anyone can successfully incorporate Forky's googly eyes into the design somehow, know that you'd at least win the contest for my Debian desktop wallpaper.

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Starlink spectrum deal boosts Musk plan to beat AT&T, T-Mobile, and Verizon

Starlink spectrum deal boosts Musk plan to beat AT&T, T-Mobile, and Verizon

fivenewscrypto    octobre 10, 2026   

SpaceX has a deal to purchase nationwide low-band spectrum licenses for a planned terrestrial mobile network that would complement the space-based Starlink cellular service.

SpaceX will buy up to 14 megahertz of spectrum in the 800 MHz band from investment firm Grain Management, which bought the spectrum rights from T-Mobile earlier this year. T-Mobile had obtained the spectrum when it bought Sprint in 2020 and was required to sell the licenses under a merger condition imposed by the US government.

"This prime low-band spectrum addresses one of the key remaining technical gaps that will pave the way for Starlink Mobile to become a major mobile carrier in the US," SpaceX said yesterday. SpaceX this week also received US approval to launch 15,000 satellites for an upgraded version of its mobile service that it says will be far more powerful than the current offering.

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Microsoft barred from sponsoring foreign workers for US residency

Microsoft barred from sponsoring foreign workers for US residency

fivenewscrypto    octobre 10, 2026   

Donald Trump’s administration has temporarily banned Microsoft, Adobe, and several other tech companies from sponsoring workers for permanent US residency, claiming they abused immigration programs at the expense of American citizens.

Vice-president JD Vance said on Thursday that the H-1B visa programme for highly skilled foreign workers had “become rife with fraud” and that over-reliance on such schemes was “a fundamental insult to the American worker.”

He added that “no company in the US” had “abused this system” more than Microsoft.

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Rocket Report: A rare Falcon 9 scrub; is it just about Vulcan's time to shine?

Rocket Report: A rare Falcon 9 scrub; is it just about Vulcan's time to shine?

fivenewscrypto    octobre 10, 2026   

Welcome to Edition 9.14 of the Rocket Report! The big news this week, from our perspective, is that United Launch Alliance's Vulcan rocket appears to be close to launching. We've seen a no-earlier-than launch date for the return to flight mission of October 29 (an Amazon Leo flight), and the next rocket up after that, also an Amazon Leo mission, is also planned for this year. Assuming the solid rocket boosters work, Vulcan could be poised for a major breakthrough next year in cadence.

As always, we welcome reader submissions, and if you don't want to miss an issue, please subscribe using the box below (the form will not appear on AMP-enabled versions of the site). Each report will include information on small-, medium-, and heavy-lift rockets as well as a quick look ahead at the next three launches on the calendar.

Nuri rocket notches another success. South Korea successfully deployed five satellites for its first domestically launched microsatellite constellation during the fifth flight of its homegrown Nuri rocket Wednesday, Yonhap News Agency reports. In addition to the primary payload of five New-space Earth Observation Satellite Constellation for National Safety microsatellites, nine of the rocket's 10 CubeSat secondary payloads were released as planned, according to the Korea AeroSpace Administration. PERSAT-02, developed by South Korean startup Quaternion, failed to separate from the rocket.

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