DARPA and Bell Textron collaborate on an experimental aircraft that takes off and lands vertically, like a helicopter, but can cruise at jet speeds once airborne. This is known as the X-76 under DARPA’s SPRINT program, which stands for Speed and Runway Independent Technologies. It’s part of a long-standing military challenge: fixed-wing aircraft provide maximum speed, but only if you have a runway to land on; helicopters, on the other hand, can take off and land almost anywhere, but they can’t fly as fast. The X-76 seeks to address this.

Bell’s concept is a tiltrotor configuration, but with a unique twist. When hovering or flying at low speeds, the large rotors on the wingtips conduct all of the work, with power from the turboshaft engine. However, as the aircraft accelerates (we’re talking 150 to 200 knots), the wings kick in and begin generating lift on their own, at which time the rotors feather, begin moving out of the way to save energy, and eventually stop spinning entirely. Once stopped, they fold back against the engine nacelles. After that, the power is transferred to a jet nozzle at the back of the engine, allowing you to fly quickly and cleanly without the drag penalty of spinning blades.

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The stop/fold system is at the heart of the innovation here, as unlike previous tiltrotors, such as the V-22 Osprey, which keep their rotors whirling even when in forward flight, the X-76 can simply fold them up and continue flying. That means it can travel significantly quicker, with some estimates putting it at over 400 knots, potentially even 450, and covering lengths of approximately 1,000 nautical miles with a payload of a thousand pounds or so. It can even be operated from a rough area of land, eliminating the requirement for a beautiful airfield.

DARPA launched the SPRINT program in late 2023, with Bell and another business working on early prototypes. Bell secured the contract for the detailed design in 2025, followed by a critical design assessment, and received the official X-76 designation in early 2026, coinciding with the United States’ 250th birthday. They are currently creating the demonstrator, which will be tested on the ground before flying in 2028.

The prototype’s designs show it as a sleek, unmanned aircraft, but Bell’s also considered scaled-up versions that might carry humans and weigh anything between 4,000 and 100,000 pounds. The concept is based on Bell’s years of expertise with vertical-lift machines like as the V-280 Valor, but they’ve gone a step further and simplified the power transmission by eliminating all of the intricate gearboxes and instead using two independent thermodynamic cycles: one for the rotors and another for the jet.
[Source]

Good morning! Let’s play Connections, the NYT’s clever word game that challenges you to group answers in various categories. It can be tough, so read on if you need Connections hints.

What should you do once you’ve finished? Why, play some more word games of course. I’ve also got daily Strands hints and answers and Quordle hints and answers articles if you need help for those too, while Marc’s Wordle today page covers the original viral word game.

Apple’s manufacturing design team is developing a process to 3D print aluminium chassis components for future iPhone and Apple Watch models, according to Bloomberg’s Mark Gurman, extending a technique the company has already quietly deployed across several recent products.

The move follows Apple’s use of 3D printing for the titanium shell of the Apple Watch Ultra 3, the Apple Watch Series 11, and the USB-C port on the iPhone Air, establishing a manufacturing foundation the company now appears confident enough to scale toward its highest-volume product lines.

Aluminium presents a more complex challenge than titanium, given the material’s different structural and thermal properties, but a successful transition would give Apple the same core advantages it has already realised with titanium, including reduced raw material waste, lower production costs, and a path toward using recycled source material across more of its hardware.

The environmental dimension carries weight beyond cost reduction, with 3D printing generating significantly less material waste than traditional forging and machining processes that remove large amounts of metal to arrive at a finished chassis shape.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Heise: Pay securely with an Android smartphone, completely without Google services: This is the plan being developed by the newly founded industry consortium led by the German Volla Systeme GmbH. It is an open-source alternative to Google Play Integrity. This proprietary interface decides on Android smartphones with Google Play services whether banking, government, or wallet apps are allowed to run on a smartphone.

Obstacles and tips for paying with an Android smartphone without official Google services have been highlighted by c’t in a comprehensive article. The European industry consortium now wants to address some problems mentioned. To this end, the group, which includes Murena, which develops the hardened custom ROM /e/OS, Iode from France, and Apostrophy (Dot) from Switzerland, in addition to Volla, is developing a so-called “UnifiedAttestation” for Google-free mobile operating systems, primarily based on the Android Open-Source Project (AOSP).

According to Volla, a European manufacturer and a leading manufacturer from Asia, as well as European foundations such as the German UBports Foundation, have also expressed interest in supporting it. Furthermore, developers and publishers of government apps from Scandinavia are examining the use of the new procedure as “first movers.” In its announcement, Volla explains that Google provides app developers with an interface called Play Integrity, which checks whether an app is running on a device with specific security requirements. This primarily affects applications from “sensitive areas such as identity verification, banking, or digital wallets — including apps from governments and public administrations”.

The company criticizes that the certification is exclusively offered for Google’s own proprietary “Stock Android” but not for Android versions without Google services, such as /e/OS or similar custom ROMs. “Since this is closely intertwined with Google services and Google data centers, a structural dependency arises — and for alternative operating systems, a de facto exclusion criterion,” the company states. From the consortium’s perspective, this also leads to a “security paradox,” because “the check of trustworthiness is carried out by precisely that entity whose ecosystem is to be avoided at the same time”. The UnifiedAttestation system is built around three main components: an “operating system service” that apps can call to check whether the device’s OS meets required security standards, a decentralized validation service that verifies the OS certificate on a device without relying on a single central authority, and an open test suite used to evaluate and certify that a particular operating system works securely on a specific device model.

“We don’t want to centralize trust, but organize it transparently and publicly verifiable. When companies check competitors’ products, we can strengthen that trust,” says Dr. Jorg Wurzer, CEO of Volla Systeme GmbH and initiator of the consortium. The goal is to increase digital sovereignty and break free from the control of any one, single U.S. company, he says.

Bluesky CEO Jay Graber, who has led the upstart social platform since 2021, is stepping down from her role as its top executive. Toni Schneider, who has been an advisor and investor in Bluesky, will take over the job temporarily while Graber stays on as Chief Innovation Officer.

“As Bluesky matures, the company needs a seasoned operator focused on scaling and execution, while I return to what I do best: building new things,” Graber wrote in a blog post. Schneider, who was previously CEO at WordPress parent Automattic, will be that “experienced operator and leader” while Blueksy’s board searches for a permanent CEO, she said.

Graber’s history with Bluesky dates back to its early days as a side project at Jack Dorsey’s Twitter. She was officially brought on as CEO in 2021 as Bluesky spun off into an independent company (it officially ended its association with Twitter in 2022 and Dorsey cut ties with Bluesky in 2024). She led the company through its launch and early viral success as it grew from an invitation-only platform to the 43 million-user service it is today. During that time, she’s become known as an advocate for decentralized social media and for trolling Mark Zuckerberg’s t-shirt choices.

Nearly three years since it launched publicly, Bluesky has carved out a small but influential niche in the post-Twitter social landscape. The platform is less than a third of the size of Meta’s competitor, Threads, which has also copied some of Bluesky’s signature features. Bluesky also has yet to roll out any meaningful monetization features, though it has teased a premium subscription service in the past.

As Chief Innovation Officer, Graber will presumably still be an influential voice at the company going forward. And, as Wired points out, she still has a seat on Bluesky’s board so she will get some say in who steps into the role permanently. Until then, Schneider, who is also a partner at VC firm Tre Ventures, will lead the company. “I deeply believe in what this team has built and the open social web they’re fighting for,” he wrote in a post on Bluesky.

from the fever-dream dept

There’s this insane subset of people who, when they talk about Donald Trump, I’ll never understand. It’s the ones who claim that taking what Donald Trump says seriously is a mistake that most people are unlikely to make. It’s also expressed by the crowd that claims something to the effect of: you shouldn’t take Trump literally, but you should take him seriously.

That this is said about the most powerful single individual on the planet is bonkers. This is typically how I’ve talked about my own kids when they were toddlers. Inevitably, one of my kids would be trying to say something entirely innocuous, only to have what came out of their mouth be some horrible word or swear or something. And I would hand-wave that away. C’mon, I’d tell people, you know that’s not what he meant to say.

Donald Trump is, unfortunately, the President of the United States of America. When he speaks, people listen. And a percentage of those listening will take him both literally and seriously. And when Donald Trump told American women last year to not take Tylenol, or give it to their young children, because it would give their kids autism, well, they listened.

Researchers found that in the wake of that batshit crazy announcement, use of Tylenol and its generic equivalents dropped significantly in use in emergency rooms and prescriptions written for children.

For nearly three months after that, new research found, Tylenol orders for pregnant women showing up in emergency rooms dropped and prescriptions of the generic drug for children rose. This happened despite sharp criticism of the president’s message from doctor groups saying that the drug, leucovorin, shouldn’t be broadly used for autism and Tylenol is safe during pregnancy.

“It just shows that in our country right now, health care has been politicized in a way that political messages are driving and impacting care — and not always for good,” said Dr. Susan Sirota, a pediatrician in Highland Park, Illinois, who wasn’t involved with the research.

The research suggested something like a 10% drop in measurable use of acetaminophen or paracetamol in the wake of Trump’s announcement. That doesn’t tell the whole story, of course, since so much of the use of Tylenol occurs through over the counter purchases at drug stores and the like. Based on market research, however, Tylenol specifically saw a nearly identical 11% or so drop in OTC sales as well back in November.

But that isn’t all. With all of this attention on a common drug supposedly giving children autism, parental anxiety about the condition has shot up as well. And, as a result, parents are turning toward experimental drugs for that that defy expert recommendations. That’s where leucovorin comes in.

Leucovorin is a derivative of folic acid used for, among other things, reducing the toxic side effects of certain chemotherapy drugs and treating a rare blood disorder. It has also been studied for a neurological condition known as cerebral folate deficiency and for a subset of autistic children, according to the American Academy of Pediatrics.

The pediatrics group doesn’t recommend routine use of the drug for autistic children. Early, small-scale studies have explored its use, “and some findings suggest potential benefit in carefully selected cases,” the group said.

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Still, after the federal announcement about the drug, Sirota said some families in her practice asked about getting it for their autistic children. She educated them about the evidence, told them about the potential for side effects and didn’t prescribe it. Potential side effects include irritability, nausea and vomiting and skin issues like dermatitis.

This may sound melodramatic, but there is real psychological harm being done to those just starting families in this country. For most parents, their children become their entire world. Their raison d’etre. And if you scare the shit out of them about Tylenol giving their kids a disorder, they’re going to stop taking the common drug and turn to any hair-brained lifeline they can find to try to keep their children from that disorder.

Does leucovorin do anything at all for anyone with autism? I don’t have the slightest clue. And neither does the Trump administration. I’m quite confident that there is no current reason to see Tylenol as a danger to the general populace, however, and that didn’t stop Trump from going on television and playing doctor.

“It feels like a pattern with our government, right? They keep building on these houses of cards that just fall down,” she said. “This politicizing of medicine just in general, and moving away from science, has been so challenging.”

The consequences of this sort of thing are going to span decades. Let that sink in.

Filed Under: donald trump, health, rfk jr., tylenol

Companies: kenvue

More than 30 employees from OpenAI and Google, including Google DeepMind chief scientist Jeff Dean, filed an amicus brief on Monday in support of Anthropic in its legal fight against the US government.

“If allowed to proceed, this effort to punish one of the leading US AI companies will undoubtedly have consequences for the United States’ industrial and scientific competitiveness in the field of artificial intelligence and beyond,” the employees wrote.

The brief was filed just hours after Anthropic sued the Department of Defense and other federal agencies over the Pentagon’s decision to designate the company a “supply-chain risk.” The sanction, which severely limits Anthropic’s ability to work with military contractors, went into effect after Anthropic’s negotiations with the Pentagon fell apart. The AI startup is seeking a temporary restraining order to continue its work with military partners as the lawsuit progresses. This brief specifically supports this motion.

Signatories of the brief include Google DeepMind researchers Zhengdong Wang, Alexander Matt Turner, and Noah Siegel, as well as OpenAI researchers Gabriel Wu, Pamela Mishkin, and Roman Novak, among others. Amicus briefs are legal filings submitted by parties that are not directly involved in a court case but that have expertise relevant to it. The employees signed in a personal capacity and don’t represent the views of their companies, according to the brief.

OpenAI and Google did not immediately respond to WIRED’s request for comment.

The amicus brief says that the Pentagon’s decision to blacklist Anthropic “introduces an unpredictability in [their] industry that undermines American innovation and competitiveness” and “chills professional debate on the benefits and risks of frontier AI systems.” It notes that the Pentagon could have simply dropped Anthropic’s contract if it no longer wished to be bound by its terms.

The brief also says that the red lines Anthropic claims it requested, including that its AI wouldn’t be used for mass domestic surveillance and the development of autonomous lethal weapons, are legitimate concerns and require sufficient guardrails. “In the absence of public law, the contractual and technological requirements that AI developers impose on the use of their systems represent a vital safeguard against their catastrophic misuse,” the brief says.

Several other AI leaders have also publicly questioned the Pentagon’s decision to label Anthropic a supply-chain risk. OpenAI CEO Sam Altman said in a post on social media that “enforcing the SCR [supply-chain risk] designation on Anthropic would be very bad for our industry and our country.” He added that “this is a very bad decision from the DoW and I hope they reverse it.” As Anthropic’s relationship with the Pentagon soured, OpenAI quickly signed its own contract with the US military, a decision some people criticized as opportunistic.