The UK’s competition watchdog has launched an investigation into Apple's and Google’s mobile platforms, just days after the government forced out its chair as part of a push to cut the regulatory burden on business.

The Competition and Markets Authority said on Thursday it would examine whether the creators of the iPhone and Android smartphone operating systems should be subjected to extra scrutiny over how they run their mobile platforms, in its second investigation under the new digital markets regime.

The announcement comes just two days after the government ousted Marcus Bokkerink as chair of the CMA, amid concerns the regulator was not sufficiently focused on growth.

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Now 11 seasons in, Formula E has come a long way from its sometimes-chaotic early days and those mid-race pitstops to change cars. Car swaps went away a long time ago, but when the series gets back to racing next month in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia, the mid-race pit stop will be back. Except this time, the cars will be quickly recharged by powerful 600 kW fast chargers.

The new race feature, which Formula E is calling "pit boost," is a 30-second pitstop, during which time the car receives a 600 kW fast charge—more than twice as much power as a Tesla Supercharger—that adds 10 percent (3.85 kWh) to the battery's state of charge. It's mandatory for every car in the race, but a team is only allowed to charge one of its two cars at a time, and only within a specified window of time during the race.

Some people are probably going to be unimpressed with the length of the stops—while they're shorter than you might see at a prototype stop at Le Mans or Daytona, you also won't see mechanics running around changing tires. We're also talking an order of magnitude longer than a current Formula 1 pitstop, which will no doubt be used as ammunition by Formula E's detractors, just as the lap-time comparisons are.

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The Cadillac Lyriq was the first of a new breed of General Motors' electric vehicles. Built around a common battery platform ( which used to be called Ultium ), the midsize SUV has been on sale for about three years now, and for model year 2026, there's a new version available, the first Cadillac EV to wear the V-series badge.

"V-Series captures the spirit of Cadillac, embodying our relentless pursuit of engineering excellence through our racing and production vehicles," said John Roth, vice president of Global Cadillac. "LYRIQ-V takes this commitment a step further in the EV era, pushing our performance pedigree of V-Series to new heights with a powerful, personalized and high-tech driving experience that fits perfectly into our customers' lives," Roth said.

As with other Cadillac V-series cars, you can expect a much higher power output than the base models. In this case, that's a hefty 615 hp (459 kW) and 650 lb-ft (880 Nm)—not quite double the output of the single-motor Lyriq we drove back in 2023. The Lyriq-V uses a pair of motors to achieve that output, powered by the same 102 kWh battery pack as in the normal Lyriq.

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Parents, students, teachers, and administrators throughout North America are smarting from what could be the biggest data breach of 2025: an intrusion into the network of a cloud-based service storing detailed data of millions of pupils and school personnel.

The hack, which came to light earlier this month, hit PowerSchool, a Folsom, California firm that provides cloud-based software to some 16,000 K–12 schools worldwide. The schools serve 60 million students and employ an unknown number of teachers. Besides providing software for administration, grades, and other functions, PowerSchool stores personal data for students and teachers, with much of that data including social security numbers, medical information, and home addresses.

On January 7, PowerSchool revealed that it had experienced a network intrusion two weeks earlier that resulted in the “unauthorized exportation of personal information” customers stored in PowerSchool’s Student Information System (SIS) through PowerSource, a customer support portal. Information stolen included individuals’ names, contact information, dates of birth, medical alert information, Social Security Numbers, and unspecified “other related information.”

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Late last month, researchers revealed a finding that’s likely to shock some people and confirm the low expectations of others: Renewable energy facilities throughout Central Europe use unencrypted radio signals to receive commands to feed or ditch power into or from the grid that serves some 450 million people throughout the continent.

Fabian Bräunlein and Luca Melette stumbled on their discovery largely by accident while working on what they thought would be a much different sort of hacking project. After observing a radio receiver on the streetlight poles throughout Berlin, they got to wondering: Would it be possible for someone with a central transmitter to control them en masse, and if so, could they create a city-wide light installation along the lines of Project Blinkenlights ?

Images showing Project Blinkenlights throughout the years. Credit: Positive Security

The first Project Blinkenlights iteration occurred in 2001 in Berlin, when the lights inside a large building were synchronized to turn on and off to give the appearance of a giant, low-resolution monochrome computer screen.

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NASA's acting administrator is moving swiftly to remove diversity, equity, inclusion, and accessibility—or DEIA—programs from the space agency.

In an email sent to agency employees on Wednesday afternoon, acting administrator Janet Petro wrote, "We are taking steps to close all agency DEIA offices and end all DEIA-related contracts in accordance with President Trump’s executive orders titled Ending Radical and Wasteful Government DEI Programs and Preferencing and Initial Rescissions of Harmful Executive Orders and Actions."

During his run for a second term as president, Trump campaigned on ending programs in the federal government that promote diversity, equity, and inclusion. He signed executive orders to that effect shortly after his inauguration on Monday.

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What could go wrong with eating an extremely high-fat diet of beef, cheese, and sticks of butter? Well, for one thing, your cholesterol levels could reach such stratospheric levels that lipids start oozing from your blood vessels, forming yellowish nodules on your skin.

That was the disturbing case of a man in Florida who showed up at a Tampa hospital with a three-week history of painless, yellow eruptions on the palms of his hands, soles of his feet, and elbows. His case was published today in JAMA Cardiology .

Painless yellowish nodules were observed on the patient’s palms (A) and elbows. B, Magnified view of the palmar lesions. These lesions are consistent with xanthelasma, likely resulting from severe hypercholesterolemia associated with a high-fat carnivore diet. Credit: JAMA Cardiologym 2024, Marmagkiolis et al.

The man, said to be in his 40s, told doctors that he had adopted a "carnivore diet" eight months prior. His diet included between 6 lbs and 9 lbs of cheese, sticks of butter, and daily hamburgers that had additional fat incorporated into them. Since taking on this brow-raising food plan, he claimed his weight dropped, his energy levels increased, and his "mental clarity" improved.

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Apple must face a potential class action alleging that Apple had a policy of paying men higher salaries than women for similar work .

On Tuesday, California Superior Court Judge Ethan P. Schulman filed an order that largely denies Apple's motions to strike the class allegations and suspend several class claims. This allows what one lawyer representing women suing, Joseph Sellers, said was "a very important case that impacts thousands of current and former female Apple employees."

Perhaps most significantly, Apple tried and failed to argue that pay disparities for individual female workers suing were "justified" and that their circumstances were not common to the 12,000 female employees who could be owed backpay if the class action is certified and Apple loses.

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Reddit is staying out of the current revolt against social media website X and, to a lesser degree, Meta, on its platform.

Since Tuesday, hundreds of subreddits have discussed and/or implemented bans against the site formerly called Twitter, as reported by 404 Media . Dozens of subreddits have already agreed to disallow the sharing of any links to X, with moderators (volunteer Reddit users) agreeing to enforce the bans.

The trend seemed to start among subreddits focused on sports-related topics, like the subreddits for the NFL , the Vancouver Canucks NHL team, and the Liverpool Football Club , as reported by Mashable . However, as of today, subreddits of various topics are discussing X bans . Reddit users in support of X bans like the one instituted by r/londonontario have pointed to various reasoning, including not being able to see tweet links without having an X account, Elon Musk appearing to make a Nazi salute at the presidential inauguration on Monday (as cited by r/Christianity’s and r/newjersey's bans, for example), and general dislike for Musk and/or how he runs X.

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