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      Diabetes org apologizes for ejecting scientists over criticism of Trump

      news.movim.eu / ArsTechnica • 1 day ago

    Amid intense backlash, the head of the American Diabetes Association posted a video Wednesday apologizing for the organization's decision on Friday to forcefully remove five leading diabetes scientists from the association's annual meeting.

    The scientists were ejected for handing out copies of an April editorial—published in the ADA's own journal Diabetes Care—that sharply criticizes the Trump administration for the damage and destruction it's wreaking on biomedical research. The five scientists included Steven Kahn, professor of medicine at the University of Washington, who is the editor-in-chief of Diabetes Care and a co-author of the editorial. It also included former ADA President Desmond Schatz of the University of Florida.

    The scientists were distributing the editorial outside the conference's opening speech, which was originally scheduled to be given by Jay Bhattacharya, head of the National Institutes of Health under Trump. Bhattacharya canceled at the last minute, and senior NIH official Rick Woychik took his place.

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      Man sues Florida cops over arrest spurred by "93% match" in facial recognition

      news.movim.eu / ArsTechnica • 1 day ago • 1 minute

    A man suing Florida police alleges that cops relied on a faulty facial recognition match and concealed exculpatory evidence when they arrested him on a charge of attempting to lure a child in August 2024. The plaintiff, Robert Dillon, was arrested after a facial recognition system flagged him as a 93 percent match to a suspect filmed by a McDonald's surveillance camera.

    "This case is about what happens when police let an error-prone artificial intelligence system stand in for an investigation," said the lawsuit filed today. "A facial recognition algorithm flagged Robert Dillon as the man who tried to lure or entice a child under twelve years old at a Jacksonville Beach McDonald’s. It was wrong. Mr. Dillon, a fifty-two-year-old resident of Fort Myers, had never set foot in Jacksonville Beach. But rather than test the machine’s answer against the evidence that would have cleared him, the officers built a case to confirm it. Mr. Dillon was arrested and prosecuted for one of the most stigmatizing crimes a person can face."

    Dillon lives more than 300 miles from Jacksonville Beach, and a police search of a license plate reader database found no evidence he was in the area when the alleged crime was committed, the lawsuit said. Dillon was flagged as the suspect based on a low-quality image, specifically a photo taken of a McDonald's computer screen that was displaying video surveillance footage, the lawsuit said.

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      Logitech’s foldable mouse is for people who refuse to carry a mouse with them

      news.movim.eu / ArsTechnica • 1 day ago • 1 minute

    I see it often. Hardworking professionals in cafés, airports, or parks hunched over a laptop while carefully dragging their fingers over their PC’s trackpad to navigate some email, project, or alert that can’t be ignored. They would prefer a mouse to a trackpad, but are reluctant to travel with one.

    When you’re on the go, carrying a mouse can seem burdensome or unnecessary. But I’d argue that it’s worth the boost in efficiency and comfort when navigating your computer, tablet, or phone . For the people who refuse to carry a bulky mouse with them, even when they plan to use their computer away from their desk, I’m glad Logitech launched the Mobi Fold, a foldable, wireless mouse. But I’d still push reluctant mobile mouse users toward something even more comfortable.

    Logitech’s Mobi Fold

    Logitech Mobi Fold going into someone's back pocket The mouse's PAW3222 sensor supports 400-4,000 DPI in 100-DPI increments. Credit: Logitech

    The Logitech Mobi Fold released today for $80 folds in half so that it’s easy to carry around. Logitech’s announcement claimed that it found that “while 72 percent of professionals own a mouse, only 26 percent actually use one when working in public places.” The announcement didn’t explain Logitech’s methodology, but it seems that someone at the Swiss company has also grimaced at the awkwardly bent wrist of people using laptop trackpads in public.

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      Google's latest DiffusionGemma open AI model comes with a 4x speed boost

      news.movim.eu / ArsTechnica • 1 day ago • 1 minute

    Another day, another AI model from Google. This time, Google DeepMind has released a new member of the Gemma 4 open model family , but it's fundamentally different from the rest of the lineup. DiffusionGemma doesn't generate outputs linearly like most AI models. Instead, it can produce an entire block of text in parallel. Google says this makes it faster and more efficient when running on local hardware like an Nvidia DGX or a humble gaming GPU.

    Most AI models are designed to be autoregressive—they generate text left to right one token at a time. DiffusionGemma has more in common with image generation models, which start with static and then denoise it to create the desired content. This model takes a field of placeholder tokens running over the canvas multiple times to generate likely tokens and using those to improve estimation of others. At the end of the process, the model finalizes its token outputs in one large block—the "denoised" text canvas.

    DiffusionGemma is fairly large in the realm of Google's open models. It's a Mixture of Experts (MoE) model with a total of 26 billion parameters, but only 3.8 billion are activated during inference. That means it should fit in the 18GB ram allotment of a high-end GPU. In testing with an RTX 5090, DiffusionGemma spits out around 700 tokens per second. With a single Nvidia H100 AI accelerator, DiffusionGemma can produce 1,000+ tokens per second. That's about four times the output of the similarly sized autoregressive Gemma models.

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      We managed to glean some interesting details about the Artemis III mission

      news.movim.eu / ArsTechnica • 1 day ago

    On Tuesday, NASA announced the crew for the Artemis III mission , which is scheduled to be flown no earlier than summer 2027. As part of the announcement, space agency officials also discussed plans for the crew to dock with both a Blue Origin lander and a SpaceX Starship lander during the spaceflight in low-Earth orbit.

    The presentation, although informative, still left open key questions about the landers' readiness and what exactly they'll look like. After the crew announcement, Ars sat down with Jeremy Parsons, NASA's Artemis program manager, to answer some of these questions.

    This interview, conducted at NASA's Johnson Space Center, has been lightly edited for clarity.

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      Nobody needs AI to search the Internet, court says in ruling against Google

      news.movim.eu / ArsTechnica • 1 day ago

    Potentially impacting all AI search engines and chatbots known to poorly paraphrase source links, a German court has ruled that Google is liable for false statements in AI Overviews.

    The preliminary ruling came in a case flagged by The Decoder , where two publishers found that Google's AI Overviews incorrectly linked them to scams and other sketchy business practices. After smearing publishers by making affirmative statements like "Yes, [it] is known for dubious business practices and is often perceived as a scam," Google failed to correct the misleading output, even after the publishers sent a cease-and-desist letter earlier this year.

    Google tried the usual arguments to shield itself from liability for false statements in AI Overviews, such as arguing that most users understand that AI outputs aren't always accurate and must be verified.

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      Cheap Iranian drone downed $25 million US Army helicopter—maybe by chance

      news.movim.eu / ArsTechnica • 1 day ago

    A US Army helicopter gunship was apparently struck by an Iranian Shahed drone before going down near the Strait of Hormuz—but it's unclear whether the one-way attack drone was deliberately aimed or achieved more of a lucky accidental strike.

    Axios correspondent Barak Ravid first reported an unnamed US government official’s comments that an Iranian drone had hit the US Army AH-64 Apache helicopter before the latter went down on June 8. The New York Times later confirmed that reporting through more anonymous US officials, including one official who said US military investigators were still evaluating whether the Iranian drone strike on the helicopter was intentional or accidental.

    Iran has fired thousands of such Shahed drones against a wide range of military and civilian targets in the Gulf region since February 28, 2026, when the United States and Israel began the war by jointly attacking Iran with a barrage of bombs and missiles. But Shahed drones have mainly struck stationary targets such as Amazon data centers and energy facilities, sometimes hitting slow-moving commercial ships in the Strait of Hormuz .

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      OB-GYNs release their own vaccine schedule, rejecting RFK Jr.'s meddling

      news.movim.eu / ArsTechnica • 1 day ago

    For the first time, the American College of Obstetricians & Gynecologists (ACOG) has released its own recommendations for maternal vaccination , providing formal guidance that diverges from that of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention amid unprecedented policy changes and meddling from anti-vaccine Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr.

    ACOG President Camille Clare blamed "changing national recommendations coupled with rampant vaccine misinformation" for the confusion among patients and health care professionals about vaccines during pregnancy.

    "It is incredibly important for the public to have access to reliable, evidence-based information on maternal immunizations from a trusted source. ACOG is proud to be that source," Clare said in a statement .

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      Valve kills its retail gift card program due to scammers

      news.movim.eu / ArsTechnica • 1 day ago

    For years, Valve's physical Steam gift cards have been the closest you could come to buying a Steam game at a brick-and-mortar store. Now, Valve says it is phasing out the production of new retail gift cards, citing a losing battle against scammers exploiting the hard-to-track payment method.

    PC Guide was among the first to note the end of Valve's retail gift card program, which was quietly announced in a recent update to a Steam support page . Since launching the retail cards in 2012, Valve says it has been fighting a constant battle with scammers, who instruct victims to purchase gift cards and share the pertinent details and security PIN. Those scammers can then resell the gift card details at a discount on gray-market sites to effectively launder the funds, creating an anonymous and hard-to-trace form of payment .

    Valve says it has made various moves to slow scammers, including placing limits on redemption and availability and adding a prominent warning on the cards themselves: "Never share a pin via email, social media or over the phone."

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