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Milestone: Chemotherapy puts leukemia into remissionDate: December 6, 1954Location: Sloan Kettering Institute and Weill Cornell Medical College, New YorkPeople: Gertrude Elion and her colleaguesIn 1954, researchers reported a new drug that put children with acute leukemia into remission. This became one of the first chemotherapy drugs and would later form the basis of a new “rational” approach to drug design.Gertrude Elion earned a master’s degree in chemistry in 1941, but was rejected from many graduate research positions that were not open to women. According to an autobiographical sketch she wrote in 1988, she worked as a high school chemistry teacher…
This week’s biggest science news took us to a region 140 million light years away, where scientists have discovered the largest rotating object in the known universe. Astronomers discovered this giant rotating filament, which is wider than the Milky Way and connected in a daisy chain of 14 galaxies. The filament spins at about 68 miles per second (110 kilometers per second).Researchers looked closer to home in southern Africa. There, human populations were genetically isolated for 100,000 years.The study examined a large number of human bones, up to 10,000 years old, found south of the Limpopo River, which begins in…
Aaru, a startup that uses AI to provide near-instantaneous customer research by simulating user behavior, has raised a Series A led by Redpoint Ventures, according to three people familiar with the deal. The funding round included various evaluation stages, the people said. Some of the shares were acquired at a valuation of $1 billion, but lower valuations from other investors brought the overall valuation below $1 billion, according to people familiar with the deal. While multiple valuations within the same round are rare in venture capital, investors say it’s becoming increasingly common for desirable AI startups in the current market.…
Waymo plans to issue a voluntary software recall to federal safety regulators related to how its robotaxis operate around school buses, the Alphabet-owned company told TechCrunch. The company said a voluntary software recall will be filed early next week. Waymo said it updated its software on Nov. 17 as soon as the issue was identified. The company claims that this update significantly improves performance to a level that outperforms human drivers in this critical area. In the era of modern passenger cars and now robotaxis, where operations are handled by software, software recalls have become more common. These updates or…
Antonio Forenza was working as a research and development director at Rakuten Symphony, a telecommunications subsidiary of a Japanese conglomerate, when he realized he needed to find a better way to manage his stress levels. A few years ago, he lost 40 pounds thanks to his Apple Watch, which counts steps and records calories burned, and he started wondering if there was a similar device to assess his stress. “I wanted to reduce my stress by 40 pounds, and I realized there wasn’t a wearable that could do that right now,” Forenza told TechCrunch. That’s when Forenza realized he had…
AI startup Limitless, formerly known as Rewind, has been acquired by Meta, the company announced on its website Friday. The company, which developed an AI-powered pendant that records conversations, has announced that it will no longer sell the hardware device and will maintain support for existing customers for one year. Customers will no longer have to pay a subscription fee and will be moved to an unlimited plan for the time being. Other features will also be phased out, including Rewind, non-pendant software that records users’ desktop activity and turns it into a searchable record. The startup, founded by Brett…
ChatGPT’s growth is starting to taper off, according to new data from market intelligence firm Sensor Tower. Today, OpenAI-owned AI chatbots remain the leaders in this space, accounting for 50% of global downloads on mobile devices and 55% of global monthly active users. However, Google’s Gemini is starting to outperform ChatGPT in terms of download growth, monthly active user growth, and time spent in the app, the company’s research found. Over time, this increased pace of adoption could help Gemini close the gap with ChatGPT. OpenAI is now concerned about that, as the recent “Code Red” memo showed. The document,…
December 5, 2025Ravi LakshmananEmail Security/Threat Investigation New agent browser attack targeting Perplexity’s Comet browser. A seemingly innocuous email can be turned into a destructive action that erases the entire contents of a user’s Google Drive, research from Striker STAR Labs reveals. Zero-click Google Drive wiper technology is all about automating everyday tasks by connecting your browser to services like Gmail and Google Drive, giving them access to read emails, browse files and folders, and perform actions such as moving, renaming, and deleting content. For example, a prompt issued by a benign user might look like this: “Please check your email…
Grand Theft Auto Online’s latest expansion includes robotaxis from a fictional but well-known company named “KnoWay,” whose sole purpose appears to be to cause havoc. A trailer released on Friday shows a KnoWay van equipped with lidar sensors barreling through city streets, destroying other cars and smashing through fake company signs. All of this is far more disruptive and destructive than some of the worst things done by Waymo’s robotaxis, but the self-driving cars in the game still resemble the company’s earlier-generation Chrysler Pacifica vans. The expansion is called “A Safehouse in the Hills” and will be available starting December…
December 5, 2025Ravi LakshmananApplication security/vulnerabilities A critical security flaw has been disclosed in Apache Tika that could lead to an XML External Entity (XXE) injection attack. This vulnerability is tracked as CVE-2025-66516 and is rated 10.0 on the CVSS scoring scale, indicating maximum severity. According to the vulnerability advisory, “A critical XXE in the Apache Tika tika-core (1.13-3.2.1), tika-pdf-module (2.0.0-3.2.1), and tika-parsers (1.13-1.28.5) modules on all platforms allows an attacker to create XML external entities via a crafted XFA file in a PDF. injection can be performed. Affects the following Maven packages: org.apache.tika:tika-core >= 1.13,= 2.0.0,= 1.13, < 2.0.0 (patched…