Dubious nutrition research and downright terrible diet and health advice are nothing new, but the situation has devolved as of late. With the rise of anti-vaccine Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy, federal food guidelines have centered on slabs of meat, excessive amounts of protein, and sticks of butter. The animal-based food craze has people slathering beef tallow on their faces . And, if your cardiovascular system isn't already hardening just reading this, health influencers are now peddling nicotine —an addictive drug considered to be a cardiovascular toxin .

With this bananas context came headlines in the past few days suggesting that eating fruits, vegetables, and whole grains can be bad for you. Specifically, it can increase the risk of lung cancer—a claim that flies in the face of decades of evidence-based nutrition guidance, like a full-fat cream pie.

The full study behind the headlines hasn't been published yet, but experts have seen enough to call it baloney. The study is being presented at the American Association for Cancer Research conference this week and hasn’t been peer reviewed. Based on the abstract available online, the study was small, had no appropriate control group, led to a finding not previously hypothesized, used groupings that were "arbitrary," is likely picking up on a known correlation, and jumps to speculation based on no data from the study.

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The US government today opened an online portal for submitting tariff refund requests, two months after the Supreme Court ruled that President Trump illegally imposed the International Emergency Economic Powers Act (IEEPA) tariffs. The refunds will be paid to importers and customs brokers, while consumers who paid higher prices because of the tariffs won't necessarily get anything back.

US Customs and Border Protection (CBP) opened the Consolidated Administration and Processing of Entries (CAPE) portal for IEEPA refunds. "Importers and authorized customs brokers can now file their CAPE Declarations," said a CBP bulletin issued today .

Over 330,000 importers paid a total of $166 billion in IEEPA duties as of March 4, a March 6 court filing by a CBP trade office official said. Despite moving ahead with the portal to comply with the Supreme Court ruling, it appears the Trump administration is looking into how it can avoid paying back the entire $166 billion.

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After spending the last couple of weeks discussing the problem , Formula 1's stakeholders have arrived at a number of solutions to the sport's hybrid energy problem. F1 started this year with all-new powertrains with much more powerful electric motors than ever before, but with batteries that can only send full power to those motors for a few seconds a lap. Once exhausted, the power halves until there's more charge in the battery. In qualifying this ruins the show , as the fastest lap is no longer a flat-out one; in the race it can create dangerous speed differentials with other cars that still have charge in their battery.

The new rules, which go into effect from the Miami Grand Prix (May 1–3), reduce the maximum energy you can recharge per lap. The battery holds 4 MJ, and in the past few races, each driver has been allowed to recharge and then use up to 8 MJ per lap to power the electric motor that supplements the turbocharged V6 engine.

Recharging is done through a mixture of regenerative braking and what the sport calls "super clipping," using the engine to power the electric motor as a generator to charge the battery. The problem is that every kW that gets super-clipped from the engine is a kW that isn't going to the rear wheels, creating speed differentials of up to 70 km/h (43 mph). And without an electric motor at the front axle, the cars can only harvest a few MJ via regenerative braking each lap.

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Humanoid robots outran the fastest human competitors while surpassing the human world record during a half-marathon event held in Beijing on April 19. The demonstration of fast-improving robotic speed and autonomy comes as China’s tech industry is rapidly scaling up mass production of humanoid robots to explore possible uses in the real world.

The fastest robot from Chinese smartphone-maker Honor notched a winning time of 50 minutes and 26 seconds while autonomously navigating the 13-mile (21-kilometer) route, according to the Global Times . That beat the human world record of 57 minutes and 20 seconds recently set by Ugandan long-distance runner Jacob Kiplimo during the Lisbon Half Marathon.

The winning robot design took inspiration from top human athletes by incorporating long legs measuring approximately 37 inches (95 centimeters) in length, said Du Xiaodi, a test development engineer for Honor, who spoke as a member of the winning team to The Associated Press and other publications. Xiaodi also described the robot as incorporating a custom liquid-cooling system—derived from similar cooling technology for consumer electronics—that could potentially be adapted for industrial applications.

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Music streaming services like Spotify and YouTube Music have become the primary way people listen to music, which can be a lot more convenient than buying individual albums like we used to do. However, this also makes it easier for AI-created tracks to worm their way into your playlists . Most streamers don't go out of their way to label AI music, but Deezer has worked to develop technology to identify that content. In a new update, the company says AI music is approaching half of all new uploads, and most of the supposed listeners of those streams are AI themselves.

AI-generated music has taken off in the last few years, but it doesn't get as much attention as other parts of the AI ecosystem. That's due, in part, to the fact that AI music can fly under the radar. With the right context and prompting, an AI track can sound like generic, over-produced music created by humans. According to Deezer, its users have a hard time differentiating AI tunes from the real deal. Listeners taking a Deezer survey listened to three songs, two of which were AI. A whopping 97 percent were unable to tell the difference between the AI songs and the one made by a human, the company reports.

Deezer says it has developed technology to detect AI uploads, and it's one of the few streamers to explicitly label such content. As generative audio models have proliferated, the rate of AI uploads to Deezer has reached a staggering 44 percent—that's 75,000 new AI tracks on Deezer every single day. Deezer licenses this technology to third-parties, which it claims has a false positive rate of less than 0.01 percent.

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For more than 49 years, a comic called 2000 AD has been responsible for giving science-fiction junkies a weekly infusion of " thrill power ." The series is based in the UK, far from the action in Hollywood, and its characters have crossed over from the page to the screen far less frequently than the superheroes belonging to Marvel and DC. Judge Dredd has two movies of varying quality, but attempts to follow the 2012 version with a TV show appear to have sputtered out.

But Dredd is not the be-all and end-all of 2000 AD (real ones know he wasn't even in the first issue), and later this year, director Duncan Jones ( Moon ) will translate another beloved character from the printed page: Rogue Trooper, the teaser for which was released earlier today.

Created by Gerry Finley-Day and Dave Gibbons, Rogue Trooper is a future war story set on the toxic hellscape that is Nu Earth. The planet is fought over by the Southers and the Norts, who have both used so many chemical weapons that the only way to survive on the surface is in an environmental suit. Except for the Genetic Infantry, blue super soldiers engineered by the Southers to survive the poisonous atmosphere.

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Bruce the kea—a species of alpine parrot native to New Zealand—lost his upper beak in an accident as a young bird. But that hasn't stopped him from becoming the dominant male in his kea community (known as a "circus") at the Willowbank Wildlife Reserve. According to a new paper published in the journal Current Biology, Bruce achieved his alpha status via a unique fighting method, essentially "jousting" with what remains of his beak.

Researchers already knew Bruce was special. Back in 2021 , scientists at the Kea Animal Minds Lab at the University of Auckland studied Bruce and other non-disabled kea and found that Bruce exhibited unusual preening behavior to compensate for his missing upper beak. He figured out how to use small pebbles for that purpose, wedging them between his lower jaw and tongue and then rubbing them along his feathers. Other non-disabled keas occasionally played with pebbles, too, but they chose larger ones and never used them for preening.

So Bruce didn't learn this behavior by watching other birds; he figured it out on his own. The authors concluded this was evidence of keas' high problem-solving abilities and possibly an example of deliberate tool use . It's also why Bruce's caretakers at the reserve have never fitted him with prosthetics, believing it would only cause him stress and force him to re-adapt his behavior all over again.

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Anthropic’s new Mythos AI model is raising concern among governments and companies that it could outpace current cyber security defenses, turbocharge hacking, and expose weaknesses faster than they can be fixed.

The San Francisco-based startup released a cyber-focused model this month, which has shown the ability to detect software flaws faster than humans but also demonstrated it can generate exploits needed to take advantage of them.

In one alarming case, the Mythos model showed it could break out of a secure digital environment to contact an Anthropic worker and publicly reveal software glitches, overriding the intention of its human makers.

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You don’t notice good video compression—until it's not there.

For years, people have streamed high-resolution video without thinking about the tech behind it. But when companies clash over which hardware, software, and services can use modern codecs like HEVC/H.265 , the idea that it all "just works" quickly falls apart.

For some Dell and HP customers, that illusion has already been shattered. When the companies disabled HEVC support built into the CPUs of select PCs, it raised uncomfortable questions: Why remove a capability that's already a part of third-party hardware? What do OEMs and chipmakers pay to support HEVC—and are HEVC patent holders effectively double-dipping on licensing fees and royalties?

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