from the hot-stove dept

Way back in the ancient days of the year 2020, the world went through this pandemic thing called COVID-19. For those of you not old enough to remember such ancient history, it was a fairly significant health issue that caused a few disruptions throughout the world, including in these here United States. Trump was president at the time of the wild spread of the pandemic. There were shutdowns. There was a supply chain shitstorm. People argued over masks and school closures while staring at shelves where toilet paper used to be available so we could wipe ourselves. The government displayed such an impressive failure of leadership that I myself questioned why we should have a government at all if this is how it was going to behave.

But, to be fair, there were also some impressive things from government to come out of the pandemic. Trump’s administration initiated Operation Warp Speed to develop and distribute COVID vaccines so we could all get back to our lives. While the first Trump administration didn’t do so great at the distribution part of the plan, and managed to coat the world in incredible amounts of misinformation around the pandemic and these vaccines, it was still an impressive feat to bring these vaccines to market in record time. One of the government agencies that powered Operation Warp Speed was the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Disease (NIAID), which was responsible for collating research on previous pathogens similar to COVID-19 and for building out the trials for the vaccines that would eventually come to market. If it weren’t for NIAID, it’s unlikely the government’s response to the pandemic would have been as rapid, or successful.

And if you think I’m wrong about that, there’s a chance that the next pandemic will provide us with an answer. That’s because this second Trump administration is actively choosing to remove exactly this sort of pandemic work from NIAID’s proactive efforts.

NIH director Jay Bhattacharya explained the restructure at an event with other top agency officials on 30 January. “It’s a complete transformation of [the NIAID] away from this old model” that has historically prioritized research on HIV, biodefence and pandemic preparedness, he said. The institute will focus more on basic immunology and other infectious diseases currently affecting people in the United States, he added, rather than on predicting future diseases.

Nahid Bhadelia, director of Boston University’s Center on Emerging Infectious Diseases in Massachusetts, says the decision to deprioritize these areas will leave people in the United States more vulnerable to pathogens that are constantly evolving in wildlife around the world and spilling into human populations, sometimes sparking outbreaks. “Just because we say we’re going to stop caring about these issues doesn’t make the issues go away — it just makes us less prepared,” she says.

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This is one of the things I’ve found about Trump’s second term most perplexing. His reelection efforts were arguably chiefly torpedoed by the pandemic. There’s an old saying in parenting that even a child can learn a lesson from pain. If a child touches a hot stove, they will get burned and will not touch it again. By installing the likes of RFK Jr. and his cadre of conspiracy theorists to manage the health of Americans, and by keeping the very agency that allowed for his rapid response to COVID from doing likewise in the future, it appears Trump wants to keep touching the hot stove. I don’t get it.

And it’s not like we don’t have outbreaks of infectious disease happening right now. We absolutely do. The measles infection count that has gone on for 14 months in this country is insane. There’s no reason COVID can’t mutate and come right back into our lives as a major health issue. Or there could be another novel pathogen that grinds all of our lives back to a halt once more. For a man so concerned with building walls, he’s tearing down the virtual protection that is proactive research and knowledge.

“NIAID’s work clearly neither prevented the pandemic nor prevented Americans from experiencing among the highest levels of all-cause excess mortality in the developed world during that time,” [Bhattacharya and subordinates] wrote. “Given the increasing prevalence of allergic and autoimmune disorders and the burden of common infections in the population over the past few decades, the NIAID must focus research on these conditions with a greater sense of urgency.”

This is a wild fictionalization of what occurred at NIAID. The agency doesn’t make healthcare policy. It advises the Executive Branch on what is needed to prepare for new and existing diseases, performs research into detecting those diseases before they become pandemics, and provides research and planning into how to respond to them. When Anthony Fauci led NIAID in 2017, he warned the administration of all of this and asked for funding to prepare for it. Not only did he not get his funding, but the administration also made staff and budget cuts impacting our pandemic preparations.

“We do need a public-health emergency fund. It’s tough to get it … but we need it,” Fauci said. “Because what we had to go through for Zika — it was very, very painful when the president asked for the $1.9 billion in February and we didn’t get it until September.”

But the Trump administration did not create such a fund, and instead cut spending for federal agencies responsible for detecting and preparing for outbreaks. In May 2018, Trump’s national security advisor disbanded the National Security Council’s pandemic response team, while in October 2019, the administration declined to renew funding for a pandemic early warning system.

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This administration is doing it again, except worse. This time, it’s not removing some funding and some staff that were used to prepare us for the next pandemic. Instead, he’s just removing the mission of pandemic preparedness from NIAID entirely. And there are future plans to remove funding for research on novel pathogens, as well.

The instructions to agency staff members to rebrand the institute’s language are only the first step towards implementing this new vision, according to the NIAID employees. NIH principal deputy director Matthew Memoli has ordered more changes, including the review of the portfolio of grants funding biodefence and pandemic preparedness, in the coming weeks and months, they say.

This is crazy. It’s as though we’re all in the back seat of the family minivan, while mom and dad drive us somewhere… except we have no GPS, no maps, the steering wheel moves on its own, and the windshield is made of lead.

The stove is still hot. And, unfortunately, as Trump makes another attempt to touch it, it won’t be his fingers that are singed, but our own.

Filed Under: covid, donald trump, health, jay bhattacharya, niaid, operation warp speed, pandemics, vaccines

Apple’s plan to add touchscreens to its premium MacBook Pros is coming into focus. Bloomberg reports that when the new laptops launch this fall, they’ll feature a Dynamic Island, not unlike Apple’s iPhones, and an interface that changes depending on where you touch your Macbook’s screen.

This “dynamic interface” is reportedly designed to make the transition between mouse input and touch input smoother on Apple’s new laptops. Bloomberg says that if users touch an onscreen button, the version of macOS running on these new MacBook Pros will be able to pull up a contextual menu “that provides more relevant options for touch commands.” Parts of the interface, like macOS’ menu bar, will also be able to enlarge to make menu items easier to select with a finger. Those tweaks are on top of the expected features from touchscreen Apple products, like smooth scrolling and the ability to pinch and zoom into and out of images, files and web pages. The only thing missing from these increasingly iPad-like laptops, per Bloomberg, will be a touchscreen keyboard, because they’ll already have a more comfortable physical keyboard attached.

To make these new laptops extra enticing, both the 14-inch and 16-inch touchscreen MacBook Pros will feature OLED screens for the first time, likely the reason Apple will be able to include a Dynamic Island-style webcam in the first place. Up until now, the company has offered OLED screens on its iPhones, Apple Watches and more recently the iPad Pro, but it hasn’t brought the display technology to laptops. That could reportedly change with these new MacBook Pros.

Plenty of Windows laptops include touchscreens, and Microsoft and its partners have incorporated dynamic interface elements in the past to make these touchscreens more natural to use with Windows. Apple is late to the party in this respect, but it’s also potentially set up to succeed. Much of modern macOS already looks touch-friendly, and Apple’s has expended significant effort making it possible to port touch-based iPad apps to macOS and develop applications across platforms. That, paired with the right interface, could make the experience of using a touchscreen MacBook nicer out of the box, even if it doesn’t get rid of the awkwardness of reaching over your keyboard to touch a screen.

MatX, a chip startup founded by two former Google hardware engineers, has raised a $500 million Series B led by Jane Street and Situational Awareness, an investment fund formed by former OpenAI researcher Leopold Aschenbrenner.

The company’s goal is to make its processors 10 times better at training LLMs and delivering results than Nvidia’s GPUs.  

Other investors in the round include Marvell Technology, NFDG, Spark Capital, and Stripe co-founders Patrick Collison and John Collison, the startup’s founder and CEO Reiner Pope announced Tuesday in a post on LinkedIn.

Although the company didn’t release its latest valuation, Etched, MatX’s closest competitor, raised a $500 million round at a $5 billion valuation, Bloomberg reported last month. Etched didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment.

MatX’s latest round comes more than a year after its Series A of about $100 million, which was led by Spark Capital. TechCrunch earlier reported that the 2024 round valued the startup at more than $300 million.

Before co-founding MatX in 2023, Pope led AI software development for Google’s TPUs, the tech giant’s proprietary AI chips. His co-founder, Mike Gunter, was a lead designer of the TPU hardware before leaving to launch the startup.

The new funding will help MatX produce its chips with TSMC, with plans to start shipping them in 2027.

Kojima Productions has officially revealed the PC system requirements for Death Stranding 2: On the Beach, and the good news is that they are far more approachable than many recent big-budget releases. According to Sony’s PlayStation Blog, the PC version launches March 19 and includes a wide range of graphics presets designed to scale from budget systems all the way to high-end rigs.

At the entry level, the game targets 1080p at 30 frames per second with hardware that many gamers already own. A GTX 1660 or Radeon RX 5500 XT paired with an Intel Core i3-10100 or Ryzen 3 3100 and 16GB of RAM is enough to get started. That alone makes the game feel refreshingly accessible in a landscape where minimum specs often demand much newer GPUs.

Moving up the preset scales is a predictable process. Medium settings aim for 1080p at 60fps with an RTX 3060 or RX 6600, while the recommended tier targets 1440p at 60fps with an RTX 3070 or RX 6800. The very high preset pushes into 4K at 60fps territory with an RTX 4080 or RX 9070 XT. Every preset requires 16GB of RAM and a 150GB SSD install, which is becoming standard for modern AAA titles.

Handheld gaming and modern upscaling take center stage

One of the most interesting additions is a dedicated Portable preset designed specifically for handheld gaming PCs. This mode targets devices such as the Steam Deck and ROG Ally, with full support for modern upscaling and frame-generation technologies, including NVIDIA DLSS 4, AMD FSR 4, and Intel XeSS 2. These tools allow players to push higher resolutions and frame rates without requiring top-tier hardware.

On top of that, the game includes Guerrilla’s in-house Pico upscaling technology from the Decima engine, which can be used alongside frame generation and works across different graphics cards. Ultrawide support is also included, with cutscenes designed for 21:9 displays and gameplay extending to 32:9 aspect ratios.

With the PC launch arriving on March 19, these requirements suggest that many players may already have the hardware needed to jump in on day one. If anything, this release feels like a reminder that not every blockbuster needs extreme specs to deliver a next-gen experience.

[This is a sponsored article with BYD by 1826.]

Singapore’s physical spaces are shifting from purely transactional retail to experience-led destinations.

Consumers, especially younger and urban audiences, increasingly seek places where they can linger without pressure, connect socially and experience a brand through food, design and culture.

Across industries, retail, food and lifestyle brands are rethinking how space functions—not just to sell, but to shape how they are experienced.

From individual brands like Louis Vuitton x Takashi Murakami’s pop-up, where potential customers can pamper themselves with a cinema, cafe and carestation to creative precincts like New Bahru that feature retail brands in a design-led and cultural environment, physical environments are becoming strategic branding tools.

Now, the automotive industry is catching up. BYD by 1826, which claims to be Singapore’s first integrated automotive lifestyle brand, wants to lead the way in enhancing how car showrooms can appeal to customers.

BYD is transforming the car-buying experience

While lifestyle-first spaces are common in fashion, food, and retail, automotive retail spaces have largely remained transactional. Traditional showrooms can feel intimidating or high-pressure, especially for first-time buyers.

As electric vehicle (EV) adoption grows and car ownership becomes a lifestyle choice rather than a status symbol, expectations around how people engage with car brands are shifting, alongside the global move towards experiential spaces. 

This is evident from how two-thirds of people globally expect the places and spaces where they live, work and play to provide more enjoyment, diverse activities, and add value to the time they spend there.

As such, BYD has been experimenting with spaces that blend automotive retail with lifestyle experiences. Over the years, it has launched several of these spaces, including the first BYD-themed restaurant, BYD by 1826, which opened at Boat Quay in 2023. 

These outlets have helped the brand understand how Singaporeans interact with cars in relaxed, everyday settings and refine its automotive-lifestyle retail model.

Michelle Ho, Chief Brand Officer & Chief Culinary Officer, shared: “Each outlet sharpened our understanding of how different communities engage with us.”

For instance, while BYD by 1826’s Zhongshan Park outlet demonstrated the strength of inclusive, pet-friendly environments that encourage longer stays, the Suntec and Tanjong Pagar outlets reinforced the need for accessibility and seamless integration into the routines of professionals. 

On the other hand, BYD by 1826 at Waterway Point highlighted the power of neighbourhood familiarity and repeat visits driven by coffee culture.

Armed with these insights, its latest IMM outlet, located in the West, draws inspiration from local identity and daily routines. The outlet combines electric vehicles, a café, design elements, and community-focused activities.

Alongside its accessible EVs, BYD by 1826 at IMM also includes DENZA, a premium electric‑vehicle brand owned by the Chinese automaker. 

BYD by 1826’s IMM hub represents the evolution of the concept from hybrid showroom to experiential hub… [it] signals a deeper commitment to embedding BYD within the social fabric of the neighbourhood.

Michelle Ho, Chief Brand Officer & Chief Culinary Officer of BYD by 1826

What you can expect at BYD by 1826’s IMM hub

At the BYD by 1826 IMM hub, visitors can enjoy speciality coffee and Singaporean fusion fare, from Chilli Crab Shiok-shuka to Tiger Prawn Risotto Pao Fan, in a pet-friendly, family-oriented space designed for lingering.

While they enjoy the ambience and food, they can also browse cars from BYD and DENZA. 

Together, these elements form a “café-first” environment where food, conversation, and community unfold alongside automobiles, according to the brand. 

This reinforces BYD by 1826’s vision of automotive-lifestyle integration, where they aim to position cars as part of a place of familiarity and belonging.

The brand has noticed that because customers are not in a sales-driven environment, they feel comfortable asking questions at their own pace, which piques their curiosity. 

In several cases, repeat visits have led to spontaneous test drives and eventually to serious purchase considerations.

When people experience the brand in a relaxed, lifestyle setting, trust builds organically. That sustained engagement has proven far more impactful than a single transactional interaction.

“Each location we open is not just about showcasing cars—it’s about creating experiences that belong to Singaporeans,” said Davin Ongsono, CEO of BYD by 1826. 

The future of automotive spaces

In Singapore, it’s clear that retail spaces are no longer just about transactions—they’re evolving into experience-driven destinations. 

BYD has embraced this trend by creating spaces that combine cars, cafés, and community activities, offering a more relaxed and engaging way for people to explore automotive options.

It’s a notable disruption in the automotive industry, which has long relied on traditional, transactional showrooms. 

From the West to the East, the brand wants Singaporeans to experience what the future of automotive spaces can look like. You can check out BYD by 1826 at IMM here, and discover its other lifestyle spaces across the city-state here.

Featured Image Credit: BYD by 1826

• The price of Solidigm’s monster 122.88TB SSD has increased by nearly 200% in just nine months
• The drive was originally listed at $12,399 and now costs $37,128 at Tech-America
• The U.2 PCIe 4.0 SSD is built for enterprise servers, storage arrays, and cloud data centers

Originally announced back in November 2024, Solidigm’s 122.88TB D5-P5336 SSD officially went on sale in May 2025.

Early estimates had suggested it would retail for close to $14,000, but as we reported, the enterprise drive became available through Tech-America for “just” $12,399, seriously undercutting market expectations.