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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On Tuesday, Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei predicted that AI models may surpass human capabilities "in almost everything" within two to three years, according to a Wall Street Journal interview at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland.

Speaking at Journal House in Davos, Amodei said , "I don't know exactly when it'll come, I don't know if it'll be 2027. I think it's plausible it could be longer than that. I don't think it will be a whole bunch longer than that when AI systems are better than humans at almost everything. Better than almost all humans at almost everything. And then eventually better than all humans at everything, even robotics."

Amodei co-founded Anthropic in 2021 with his sister Daniela Amodei and five other former OpenAI employees. Not long after, Anthropic emerged as a strong technological competitor to OpenAI's AI products (such as GPT-4 and ChatGPT). Most recently, its Claude 3.5 Sonnet model has remained highly regarded among some AI users and highly ranked among AI benchmarks.

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The open source Wine project—sometimes stylized WINE, for Wine Is Not an Emulator—has become an important tool for companies and individuals who want to make Windows apps and games run on operating systems like Linux or even macOS. The CrossOver software for Mac and Windows, Apple's Game Porting Toolkit , and the Proton project that powers Valve's SteamOS and the Steam Deck are all rooted in Wine, and the attention and resources put into the project in recent years has dramatically improved its compatibility and usefulness.

Yesterday, the Wine project announced the stable release of version 10.0 , the next major version of the compatibility layer that is not an emulator. The headliner for this release is support for ARM64EC , the application binary interface (ABI) used for Arm apps in Windows 11, but the release notes say that the release contains "over 6,000 individual changes" produced over "a year of development effort."

ARM64EC allows developers to mix Arm and x86-compatible code—if you're making an Arm-native version of your app, you can still allow the use of more obscure x86-based plugins or add-ons without having to port everything over at once. Wine 10.0 also supports ARM64X, a different type of application binary file that allowed ARM64EC code to be mixed with older, pre-Windows 11 ARM64 code.

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The Department of Homeland Security has terminated all members of advisory committees, including one that has been investigating a major Chinese hack of large US telecom firms.

"The Cyber Safety Review Board—a Department of Homeland Security investigatory body stood up under a Biden-era cybersecurity executive order to probe major cybersecurity incidents—has been cleared of non-government members as part of a DHS-wide push to cut costs under the Trump administration, according to three people familiar with the matter," NextGov/FCW reported yesterday .

A memo sent Monday by DHS Acting Secretary Benjamine Huffman said that in order to "eliminate[e] the misuse of resources and ensur[e] that DHS activities prioritize our national security, I am directing the termination of all current memberships on advisory committees within DHS, effective immediately. Future committee activities will be focused solely on advancing our critical mission to protect the homeland and support DHS's strategic priorities."

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Samsung announced the Galaxy S25, S25+ , and S25 Ultra at its Unpacked event today. What is different from last year's models ? With the phones themselves, not much, other than a new chipset and a wide camera. But pure AI optimism? Samsung managed to pack a whole lot more of that into its launch event and promotional materials.

The corners on the S25 Ultra are a bit more rounded, the edges are flatter, and the bezels seem to be slightly thinner. The S25 and S25+ models have the same screen size as the S24 models, at 6.2 and 6.7 inches, respectively, while the Ultra notches up slightly from 6.8 to 6.9 inches.

Samsung's S25 Ultra, in titanium builds colored silver blue, black, gray, and white silver. Credit: Samsung

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Fast radio bursts (FRBs) are puzzling phenomena because their details are so difficult to resolve, and observations to date have been inconsistent. Astronomers added another piece to the puzzle with the detection of an FRB that seems to originate in a dead galaxy that is no longer producing new stars, according to a new paper published in The Astrophysical Journal Letters, along with a related paper on the event from scientists at Northwestern University.

As we've reported previously , FRBs involve a sudden blast of radio-frequency radiation that lasts just a few microseconds. Astronomers have observed over a thousand of them to date; some come from sources that repeatedly emit FRBs, while others seem to burst once and go silent. You can produce this sort of sudden surge of energy by destroying something. But the existence of repeating sources suggests that at least some of them are produced by an object that survives the event. That has led to a focus on compact objects, like neutron stars and black holes—especially a class of neutron stars called magnetars—as likely sources. Only about 3 percent of FRBs are of the repeating variety.

There have also been many detected FRBs that don't seem to repeat at all, suggesting that the conditions that produce them may destroy their source. That's consistent with a blitzar —a bizarre astronomical event caused by the sudden collapse of an overly massive neutron star. The event is driven by an earlier merger of two neutron stars; this creates an unstable intermediate neutron star, which is kept from collapsing immediately by its rapid spin.

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