Technology & Science

WASHINGTON — The nonprofit Distributed Denial of Secrets published a database, dubbed Icepick, with the names, phone numbers and email addresses of more than 41,000 Department of Homeland Security employees and contractors. The data covers ICE, Customs and Border Protection, Homeland Security Investigations and CISA. It also includes operation names, surveillance programs and details of undercover initiatives, according to The Record's account. Independent reporter Zack Whittaker wrote that the data came from an Okta system used by DHS. A search site hosting it went offline briefly after a takedown request reached the domain registrar, while the server itself stayed up. The leak follows earlier hacks of the FBI and the Pentagon's HR department. DHS has not been quoted in the material reviewed, and the full scope of the intrusion is not independently confirmed.

HONG KONG — A trader told The Information how export-controlled high-bandwidth memory reaches China. He pairs cheap, low-performance server processors that fall below control thresholds with HBM from Samsung and SK hynix. Export rules judge the package by the processor, so the memory passes. The boards travel through Hong Kong and are carried across the border into Shenzhen. Technicians there heat them, lift off the memory and discard the rest. A Shenzhen broker said a single HBM3E unit sold for several hundred dollars a year ago and now fetches about $4,000. An AI accelerator uses six to eight such chips, so memory alone is worth $24,000 to $32,000 per GPU. Tom's Hardware, which summarized the report, says the smuggler expects U.S. and South Korean authorities to move against the practice. The claims come from a single trader and have not been independently verified.

CUPERTINO, Calif. — Apple's MacBook Pro with PROLED XDR Display, its first Mac laptop with a touchscreen, goes on sale Friday, November 6. CEO John Ternus unveiled it on October 28 at an event in Los Angeles. The 14-inch model starts at $2,899 and the 16-inch at $3,399. Both use M5 Pro or M5 Max chips. Apple says the touch sensor is built into the display panel to cut lag, and quotes up to 24 hours of battery life. Reuters noted that Bloomberg reported the touch models would ship with the existing M5 Pro and M5 Max chips, so they would add no major speed boost over current machines. The same report said Apple also refreshed the base MacBook Pro with a new M6 chip. Analysts quoted by Reuters said the move reflects Apple giving in to buyer expectations for touch.

TOKYO — Nikkei Asia reported on November 4 that AI-related obligations kept off the balance sheets of five US technology companies have grown to about $3.2 trillion. The companies are Alphabet, Microsoft, Amazon, Meta and Oracle. The total has nearly doubled in six months. Nikkei's earlier calculation for the same five firms was roughly $1.65 trillion. The newspaper says investors are growing more anxious about what it describes as seemingly unending spending. The figure is Nikkei's own tally rather than a number the companies report in one place. The report adds a new data point to this week's debate over AI financing and credit conditions. The companies' next quarterly filings will show whether the commitments keep growing at this pace.

CAMBRIDGE, Mass. — A post titled 'Weight-Space Programming' was published this week. Its authors are described as MIT CSAIL researchers Rikiya Takehi, Jayden Teoh, Alex Zhang and Omar Khattab. It argues that OpenAI's GPT-6 Astra can read a model's weights and edit them from a plain-English specification, without gradient descent. In the example that drew attention, Astra was used to improve an open Qwen model. The post, which indexers summarize as showing a general-purpose model inspecting weights to infer behavior and then editing them to fix specific failures, was among the day's most discussed items on Hacker News. Within hours, developers published rebuttals. One is headlined as calling the framing misleading, and another argues that LLMs are not superhuman at this task. Simon Willison reported that a 27-billion-parameter Qwen model running on a laptop can also interpret weights. The claims have not been independently replicated.

WASHINGTON — As the midterm elections conclude, the contest over who regulates AI has no settled federal answer. The December 2025 executive order told the Attorney General to set up a task force to challenge state AI laws. It also told Commerce to flag laws it considers onerous, told the FCC to consider a preemptive disclosure standard, and told the FTC to issue a policy statement. Law-firm analysts note an executive order cannot override state statutes on its own, and that the Senate voted 99-1 to strip a state-law moratorium from last year's budget bill. A bipartisan group of 26 state attorneys general wrote to Congress in September urging federal frontier-AI rules that expressly keep state enforcement power. Companies must still comply with state AI laws unless Congress or a court says otherwise.

NEW YORK — A law-firm analysis published this week describes a February 5 opinion by US District Judge Failla imposing terminal sanctions and nearly $40,000 in fees on defense counsel. Fourteen of the 60 cases cited in his motion-to-dismiss brief did not exist. What pushed the court past lesser penalties was repetition. Three filings carried fabricated authority after explicit warnings, including one filed while a show-cause order was pending. The judge said using AI is acceptable and that the violation was failing to verify output. Elsewhere the Sixth Circuit ordered two lawyers to pay $15,000 each in March. In England, the Solicitors Regulation Authority issued an AI warning notice on August 17, and a tribunal ordered its first strike-off in an AI case on September 3.

A fossil from Inner Mongolia is the subject of this week's Nature cover. The paper, by Zhe-Xi Luo, Chang-Fu Zhou, Thomas Martin and colleagues, describes Megacauda sungei, a mammal predecessor that lived about 165 million years ago. The authors conclude it was semi-aquatic and could both dig and swim, much like the modern platypus. The preserved throat is what makes the specimen unusual. It allowed the team to infer a soft palate and constrictor muscles. These are rare evidence of a pharynx, the structure that lets most modern mammals suckle milk and swallow without fluid entering the airway. Monotremes such as the platypus lack this arrangement. The work appears in Nature volume 658, issue 8138, dated 29 October. It is a peer-reviewed description of a single fossil, and other specimens may refine the interpretation.

Mechanical stress on the skeleton during exercise may prompt bones to release proteins that slow ageing, a study in mice suggests. Nature's daily briefing reported the work this week. Researchers gently squeezed the legs of mice to mimic the loading of exercise. That activated osteocytes, bone cells that sense force. The cells then secreted molecules that rejuvenated immune cells. The molecules also reprogrammed cells in other organs toward a younger state, the researchers report. The finding comes from animals only. It has not been tested in people, and a mouse result of this kind often does not carry over to humans. The work points to bone as an organ that sends signals through the body, alongside muscle and fat. Next steps would be to identify the specific molecules involved and to test whether the effect appears in other species.

November's sky calendar begins with the Southern Taurid meteor shower, which NASA says peaks around Nov. 5. The Northern Taurids follow around Nov. 12. Each shower yields only about five meteors an hour, but both are known for occasional bright fireballs. On the mornings of Nov. 15 and 16, Mars and Jupiter will sit about 1.2 degrees apart in the southeast before sunrise. The Leonids peak overnight Nov. 17-18, after the Moon sets, at up to about 15 meteors an hour in ideal conditions. A supermoon follows on Nov. 24, the first of three in a row, through January. Timeanddate also lists Uranus at opposition on Nov. 25. It says Venus reaches its brightest of 2026 on Nov. 27. NASA also marks Voyager 1 passing one light-day from Earth around Nov. 17-18.

Observations from the James Webb Space Telescope indicate that interstellar comet 3I/ATLAS was assembled from tiny grains of ice mixed with dust. Those grains differ from the material in comets native to the solar system. Space.com reports that the comet formed in a planet-forming disk of gas and dust around a young star. The star is unknown. The comet may be 10 to 12 billion years old, more than twice the age of the solar system. Webb detects the ice grains when sunlight warms the surface and gas carries them into the coma and tail. Mike Cordiner, who leads Webb's program on such objects, is a co-author of the paper. NASA's Webb team earlier reported the first mid-infrared chemical fingerprint of the comet, including methane, in a June 2026 update.