A centuries-old medicinal root is gaining renewed scientific attention for its ability to target multiple biological processes involved in hair loss. Androgenetic alopecia (AGA) is the most common form of hair loss seen in medical practice, affecting millions of people worldwide. Although often associated with aging, it increasingly appears at younger ages and affects both […]
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Research Highlights: Adults in midlife and older age who tend to be most active in the evening, especially women, showed poorer overall heart health compared with those who did not strongly prefer mornings or evenings, based on the American Heart Association’s Life’s Essential 8 score. The analysis of UK Biobank data suggests that common habits […]
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In a milestone, India and the European Union (EU) have hailed the conclusion of the India-EU Free Trade Agreement (FTA) while launching a ‘Comprehensive Strategic Agenda’ for 2030. Among other measures, the pact moves beyond supply chains to operationalise joint R&D in advanced semiconductor “heterogeneous integration” and chip design.
It also formally links the European AI Office with India’s National AI Mission to jointly develop safe, human-centric AI and take advantage of what the agreement called India’s vast “multilingual datasets” and Europe’s research infrastructure to secure strategic autonomy in critical technologies.
The AI and semiconductor aspects represent the maturation of three diplomatic phases. The first phase began with the ‘India-EU Strategic Partnership: A Roadmap to 2025’. At this stage, discussions on “technology” were largely confined to general matters of cybersecurity, 5G networks, and data protection and there was no specific mechanism for a more concrete collaboration between the bloc and India on hardware such as semiconductors, or specific AI model development.
In the second phase, around 2022, Prime Minister Narendra Modi and EU President Ursula von der Leyen launched the India-EU Trade and Technology Council. This body in turn created the Working Group 1 on Strategic Technologies, which moved the relationship from diplomacy to involving technical experts. In fact the new deal has explicitly credited this group with managing its “technology and innovation” aspect.
In the third and final phase, in 2023, India and EU signed the Semiconductor Memorandum of Understanding (MoU). This MoU was primarily defensive in the sense that it focused on improving the resilience of supply chains and on providing early warnings of shortages. Between 2023 and the present deal announced on January 27, the MoU evolved into a more ‘offensive’ partnership, so to speak, with a focus on creating new technologies, including through designing and prototyping, in addition to monitoring existing supply chains.
Perhaps the most significant technical detail in the document is “heterogeneous integration” (1.2.4 because it recognises that India is years away from building cutting-edge logic fabrication facilities, for example, those that manufacture chips with nodes of 2-3 nm, and thus pivots to “advanced packaging”. Heterogenous integration involves stacking different types of chips, such as logic, memory, and sensors, into a single package. Such combinations are critical for AI. Contemporary AI accelerators like Nvidia’s Graphics Processing Units (GPUs) bank more on how memory is packaged next to the processor instead of only the raw transistor size. By targetting this, the EU and India are trying to capture the value-added segment of the supply chain that is also less capital-intensive than a fabrication facility but which is just as critical for performance.
The agenda also explicitly connects semiconductor manufacturing to AI utility as the text says the deal will focus “on design and prototyping for AI applications”, thus creating a vertical market. While in 2023 the focus was on “making chips for cars”, following a crisis in their availability, the new goal is to make chips that AI models require.
India possesses roughly 20% of the world’s chip design talent (on the flip side most of them work for U.S.-based firms like Intel and Qualcomm). The EU has the research infrastructure, such as IMEC in Belgium and Fraunhofer-Gessellschaft in Germany, but lacks the design scale. And the deal effectively creates a mechanism to unify India’s designer capital with the EU’s physical capital, to create indigenous AI hardware and reduce their reliance on US intellectual property.
Finally, the operational vehicles for the deal’s semiconductor strategy are the so-called Blue Valleys — a regulatory exclave that aligns Indian with European standards, allowing component manufacturers in India to flow directly into European supply chains without new certification requirements. In other words, the Blue Valleys will effectively extend the EU Single Market technical standards to Indian soil.
Likewise, the AI section of the new deal also sets up a “common market” for AI where Indian data can flow into European models while having European regulations govern Indian AI companies (this is an example of the Brussels effect, whereby the EU exports its laws outside its borders through market mechanisms instead of direct force).
Previously, if the EU had a technical question about Indian AI policy, it would go through diplomatic channels (specifically, the External Action Service to the Ministry of External Affairs). The deal (2.1.7) now indicates a direct line: the European AI Office, which is the EU’s regulator, can interact directly with the IndiaAI Safety Institute, India’s technical auditor. As a result, the technical staff at these agencies could have a formal mandate to coordinate without requiring political permissions for every interaction.
Further, perhaps the most concrete part of the AI section of the deal is the point about “testing and evaluation”. Currently, the world doesn’t have a common definition of what constitutes safe AI. The EU’s priority might be gender bias while India’s might be political neutrality — which means a developer will have to make their model pass two tests ahead of clearance. But now, by collaborating on testing, the two agencies will likely co-author and rationalise the checklists for the models. So if the European AI Office develops a specific mathematical test to measure the rate or scope of hallucinations in a large language model, it can share that test with the IndiaAI Safety Institute for India to adopt. In fact, the point of linking these agencies is to eventually reach a point where one accepts a safety certificate issued by the other. Going ahead this will require the agencies to align their audit procedures and staff training.
For Indians this could be a civil liberties backdoor of sorts. That is, because European audit manuals are strongly rooted in the EU’s Charter of Fundamental Rights, Indian users might unknowingly gain digital protections that the domestic political climate currently sidelines. EU safety benchmarks aggressively penalise algorithmic bias against minorities and restrict invasive biometric surveillance. If Indian developers must clear these hurdles to ensure their models can be exported to Europe, the AI products deployed domestically will be embedded with European regulatory attitudes. Thus Indian users could interact with AI agents that are technically constrained from reinforcing majoritarian narratives or profiling of vulnerable communities.
However, there is also the possibility of this opportunity devolving into a stratified ecosystem akin to India’s pharmaceutical sector, where some manufacturers rigorously adhere to safety protocols for exports to U.S. and European markets while cutting corners for domestic supply. That is, Indian firms might engineer ‘clean’ and more bias-free algorithms specifically for the EU market to secure lucrative contracts while deploying invasive or unrestricted versions at home, where enforcement remains lax.
In order to fuel all these ambitions, the agenda musters two financial instruments. First, the text requires both sides “explore options for association of India to Horizon Europe” (2.3.2). If this happens, it would elevate India to the highest tier of partnership available to non-EU nations and allow Indian entities to lead consortia and compete directly for grants from the EU’s €95.5-billion research budget (₹10.4 lakh crore). This could be a bonus for the semiconductor sector as it will allow Indian chip startups to bypass the often risk-averse domestic capital markets.
Second, and on a related note, the deal also places the European Innovation Council at the helm of a new startup partnership (2.1.4). The Council specialises in what it calls “patient capital” for high-risk technologies such as quantum computing and novel chip architectures that traditional venture capitalists often avoid. By linking the Council with the Start-up India platform, the agreement creates a dedicated cross-border funding corridor for ‘hard’ technologies and fills a gap left by private investors, and could help ensure the deal’s design ambitions are backed by the necessary funds.
Published – January 27, 2026 10:38 pm IST
Dutch tech giant ASML, which sells cutting-edge machines to make semiconductor chips, reported a significant gain in annual net profit Wednesday and predicted a bright future driven by demand for artificial intelligence.
ASML is a critical cog in the global economy, as the semiconductors crafted with its tools power everything from smartphones to missiles.
After-tax profit for 2025 came in at 9.6 billion euros ($11.5 billion), compared with 7.6 billion euros for 2024.
CEO Christophe Fouquet said ASML customers were bullish on the medium-term outlook “primarily based on more robust expectations of the sustainability of AI-related demand.”
Fourth quarter net bookings, the figure traders track most closely, came in at 13.2 billion euros.
This compared with 5.4 billion euros in the third quarter of 2024 and cheered investors, with shares opening around seven percent higher on the Dutch market.
Total 2025 net sales were a record 32.7 billion euros. The firm had previously said it did not expect sales to be below the 28.3 billion euros banked last year.
ASML expects net sales in 2026 to be between 34 and 39 billion euros, it announced in new forecasts.
For the first quarter of this year, the firm predicted it would post between 8.2 billion euros and 8.9 billion euros in sales.
“We expect 2026 to be another growth year for ASML’s business,” said Fouquet.
ASML also announced an internal organisational shake-up in a bid to speed up working methods that Fouquet said had become “less agile.”
The firm expects to cut around 1,700 jobs in the Netherlands and the United States, mostly from leadership roles, Fouquet said.
ASML employs around 44,000 staff worldwide.
The tech giant is caught in the middle of a US-led effort to curb high-tech exports to China over fears they could be used to bolster the country’s military.
Beijing has been infuriated by the export curbs, describing them as “technological terrorism.”
In a case unrelated to ASML, the Dutch government briefly seized control of Nexperia, a Chinese-owned company that makes low-tech semiconductors.
That move sparked a major row between Beijing and the West that threatened to cripple car manufacturers that rely on Nexperia chips.
In late October, following trade talks between China’s President Xi Jinping and his US counterpart Donald Trump, Beijing agreed to resume exports of Nexperia chips halted over the row.
ASML already warned when presenting third-quarter results that China sales would “decline significantly” in 2026 compared with “very strong business” in 2024 and 2025.
A breakdown of sales showed 33 percent of sales going to China in 2025, compared to 41 percent in 2024. China was ASML’s top customer in both years.
Longer-term, ASML believes that the rapidly expanding AI market will push up its annual sales to between 44 billion and 60 billion euros by 2030.
Turning to the fourth quarter, ASML sales came in at 9.7 billion euros. It had forecast between 9.2 billion and 9.8 billion euros.
Net profit for the fourth quarter was 2.8 billion euros, compared to the 2.1 billion euros booked in the third quarter of last year.
Published – January 28, 2026 02:08 pm IST
The H200, Nvidia’s second most powerful AI chip, has emerged as a major flashpoint in U.S.-China relations [File]
| Photo Credit: REUTERS
China has approved its first batch of Nvidia H200 artificial intelligence chip imports, three people familiar with the matter told Reuters, marking a shift in position as Beijing seeks to balance its AI needs against spurring domestic development.
ByteDance, Alibaba and Tencent have been approved to purchase over 400,000 H200 chips in total, with other enterprises now joining a queue for subsequent approvals, said two of the sources, who spoke on condition of anonymity.
It was granted during Nvidia Chief Executive Jensen Huang’s visit to China this week, the sources said.
China’s industry and commerce ministries as well as Nvidia had not yet responded to requests for comment at the time of publication. ByteDance, Alibaba and Tencent had not responded either.
The H200, Nvidia’s second most powerful AI chip, has emerged as a major flashpoint in U.S.-China relations. Despite strong demand from Chinese firms and U.S. approval for exports, Beijing’s hesitation to allow imports has been the main barrier to shipments.
The U.S. earlier this month formally cleared the way for Nvidia to sell the H200 to China, where the company is seeing strong appetite. However, Chinese authorities have the final say on whether they would allow it to be shipped in.
It was unclear in recent weeks whether Beijing would grant approval as the government wants to balance meeting surging domestic demand for advanced AI chips and nurturing its domestic semiconductor industry.
Chinese customs authorities told agents that the H200 chips were not permitted to enter China, Reuters reported earlier this month.
But Chinese technology firms have placed orders for more than two million H200 chips, far exceeding Nvidia’s available inventory, Reuters reported last month.
It remains uncertain how many additional companies will receive approval in subsequent batches or what criteria Beijing is using to determine eligibility.
Huang arrived in Shanghai last Friday for routine annual celebrations with Nvidia’s China employees and has since travelled to Beijing and other cities, Reuters reported last week.
The approvals of H200 suggest Beijing is prioritising the needs of major Chinese internet companies, which are spending billions of dollars to build data centres needed to develop AI services and compete with U.S. rivals, including OpenAI.
While Chinese companies such as Huawei now have products that rival the performance of Nvidia’s H20 chip, previously the most advanced AI chip it was allowed to sell to China, they still lag far behind the H200.
The H200 delivers roughly six times the performance of Nvidia’s H20 chip.
Still Beijing has discussed requiring companies to buy a certain quota of domestic chips as a condition for receiving approval to import foreign semiconductors, Reuters previously reported.
Published – January 28, 2026 01:37 pm IST
Men’s heart disease risk starts rising in their mid-30s — years earlier than many doctors start looking. Men reached a 5% risk of cardiovascular disease about seven years sooner than women, highlighting a significant early gap in heart health. Coronary heart disease was the main reason for this difference, accounting for most of the earlier […]
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Sam Altman, co-founder and CEO of OpenAI [pictured above]
| Photo Credit: REUTERS
OpenAI CEO Sam Altman told employees in an internal message that ICE is “going too far” with its immigration crackdown, becoming the latest corporate executive to voice concerns about heavy enforcement actions in Minnesota.
Federal agents shot and killed a protester in Minneapolis over the weekend, the second such shooting this month, sparking widespread disapproval of the Immigration and Customs Enforcement’s actions. More than 60 CEOs have signed a statement calling for de-escalation after weeks of silence.
“What’s happening with ICE is going too far,” Altman wrote in a Slack message to employees of the ChatGPT maker, a source familiar with the matter said. “There is a big difference between deporting violent criminals and what’s happening now, and we need to get the distinction right.”
“I love the U.S. and its values of democracy and freedom and will be supportive of the country however I can; OpenAI will too,” Altman said in his message, which was first reported by the New York Times’ DealBook. “But part of loving the country is the American duty to push back against overreach.”
Altman’s comments come as a rift has emerged at Khosla Ventures, an early OpenAI backer. Founder Vinod Khosla and partner Ethan Choi disavowed comments from partner Keith Rabois over the weekend that law enforcement had not shot an innocent person and that illegal immigrants commit crimes on a daily basis.
A number of businesses have been hesitant to criticise U.S. President Donald Trump during his second term.
Since the beginning of “Operation Metro Surge” in Minneapolis in December, major Minnesota corporations had been largely silent about the effects of the immigration enforcement efforts on the city, a liberal Midwestern stronghold as well as a major corporate hub.
Leaders of companies such as 3M, UnitedHealth Group and General Mills have called for de-escalation since the second shooting over the weekend.
More than 450 employees from firms like Google, Meta Platforms, Salesforce and OpenAI signed a letter on Saturday urging their top executives to pressure the White House to withdraw ICE from U.S. cities, cancel all contracts with ICE and to speak out publicly against ICE’s violence.
“President Trump is a very strong leader, and I hope he will rise to this moment and unite the country. I am encouraged by the last few hours of response and hope to see trust rebuilt with transparent investigations,” Altman added.
Published – January 28, 2026 09:02 am IST
Teens and tweens were split Tuesday over a looming ban on social media for under-15s in France, with some admitting the risks of overuse while others laughed off the measure and vowed to dodge it.
France’s National Assembly passed a bill in a marathon overnight session that would impose a minimum age for using social media, becoming the first country in Europe to follow Australia, which banned under-16s from TikTok, Snapchat, Facebook and other sites last year.
Parents keen to curb their kids’ phone use cautiously welcomed the measure, which was championed by French President Emmanuel Macron and must now pass the Senate.
The legislation’s targets themselves were divided, with some acknowledging the dangers social media can bring and others venting their incomprehension and plotting ways to get around a ban.
Esther, a high school student in Paris, said the idea was “super” on paper.
“But the problem is, when (kids) turn 15, they’re going to get submerged by this wave. That’s the year you start high school, and you need to be focussing on other things besides social media. They should ban it for under-14s instead,” she said.
And not all social networks are equal, she insisted.
“The ones where you scroll non-stop (should be banned), because that’s what ruins your brain,” she said. But other apps “are key for social life”.
That view is shared by 11-year-old middle-schooler Aya, also from Paris.
“Social media makes some kids crazy, they stop doing anything else. And there are disgusting things on TikTok, it’s not appropriate for kids,” she said.
But “at the same time, it’s important in an emergency. I use WhatsApp to talk to my parents. They’re not going to ban WhatsApp, are they?”
WhatsApp and other private messaging platforms are not covered by the ban.
At a high school in Marseille, one 16-year-old said she had already imposed a ban on herself.
“I deleted TikTok, it was taking up too much of my time,” she said.
“I couldn’t get my homework done, my head was always somewhere else… Honestly, I think it’s a great idea.”
An August 2025 poll found 79 percent of parents and 67 percent of young people in France favoured a social media ban for under-15s.
Polling firm Odoxa found 46 percent of young people said they had felt low self-esteem comparing themselves to others on social networks, and 18 percent said they had been harassed or insulted online.
Parents meanwhile questioned the feasibility of the ban, while some said more attention needed to be focussed on prevention.
A ban “is a start, but it’s not enough”, said Emmanuelle Poudreas, whose son Clement took his own life in 2024 at age 15 after being cyberbullied on WhatsApp.
“We need the state to mobilise at every level to prepare our young people to be digital citizens,” she told AFP.
“How can we ban digital tools in middle and high schools when regional governments are financing those tools and they are being provided to students to use?”
National parents’ federation PEEP raised similar concerns.
“There’s this impression we’ve solved a problem. No. We’ve become aware of a problem, but we haven’t fixed it,” the organisation’s president, Emmanuel Garot, told AFP.
He called for more education on the risks of social media and stricter regulation of tech companies and “their damned algorithms”.
“Let’s not fool ourselves, kids are inventive. They’ll find ways to get around the ban soon enough – VPN or other social networks we barely know about.”
Ylies, a third-year middle-schooler in Paris who uses Snapchat and TikTok, already has a plan.
“What am I supposed to do? Stare at the wall?” he said.
“I’ll just open a new account and say I was born in 2004. If they ask me for ID, I’ll use my brother’s or one of his friends’.”
Published – January 28, 2026 09:35 am IST
The EU step is not a formal investigation that could lead to fines [File]
| Photo Credit: REUTERS
Google must provide rival AI services equal access to its features and other search engine platforms access to data, the EU said on Tuesday, as it said it would help the giant over six months to comply with rules.
The EU executive said it would launch proceedings to help Google prepare measures in line with its flagship rulebook, the Digital Markets Act (DMA).
Under the DMA, the world’s biggest tech companies must open up to competition to give consumers more options and limit abuses linked to market dominance.
US President Donald Trump’s government has railed against the law and its sister content moderation law the Digital Services Act, accusing Brussels of unfairly targeting US firms.
The European Commission wants to ensure Google gives rival AI service providers equal access to its Android operating system, and demands the American titan grants competing search engines access to search data.
Brussels believes the move will allow rivals “to optimise their services and offer users genuine alternatives to Google Search”.
The EU step is not a formal investigation that could lead to fines.
But if Brussels is not satisfied with Google’s efforts, it can later conclude the company is not complying.
And any DMA violations can lead to fines of up to 10 percent of a company’s total global turnover.
“We want to help Google by explaining in more detail how it should comply with its interoperability and online search data sharing obligations under the Digital Markets Act,” EU competition chief Teresa Ribera said in a statement.
Google pushed back, insisting Android is open by design.
“We’re already licensing search data to competitors under the DMA,” Google’s senior competition counsel Clare Kelly said in a statement.
“However, we are concerned that further rules which are often driven by competitor grievances rather than the interest of consumers, will compromise user privacy, security, and innovation.”
The commission said it would conclude the proceedings within six months.
Google already faces a fine under the DMA for favouring its own services in a probe launched in March 2024.
The giant has also been subject to a separate DMA probe since November over suspicions it pushed down news outlets in search results.
The scrutiny does not end with the DMA. Google also faces cases under the bloc’s competition rules.
In December, the EU said it had opened a probe to assess whether Google breached antitrust rules by using content put online by media and other publishers to train and provide AI services without appropriate compensation.
That came after the EU slapped Google with a 2.95-billion-euro ($3.5 billion) fine in September for breaking competition rules.
Published – January 28, 2026 10:02 am IST
CNBC, which first reported the news, said Meta will pay Corning through 2030 [File]
| Photo Credit: REUTERS
Facebook parent Meta Platforms will pay Gorilla Glass maker Corning up to $6 billion over the next several years in a deal to provide fiber-optic cables for its AI data centres, the companies said on Tuesday.
Corning will supply advanced optical fiber, cable and connectivity products to Meta, while expanding its manufacturing capacity in North Carolina, including at its cable factory in Hickory, where Meta will be the anchor customer.
Corning’s optical connectivity products are among key components required to support the massive computing and data transmission demands at data centres.
Their rising demand from Big Tech customers like Meta, Microsoft and Alphabet’s Google drove a more than 84% surge in Corning’s shares in 2025. The stock jumped about 7% in premarket trading.
CNBC, which first reported the news, said Meta will pay Corning through 2030.
Meta has been spending aggressively on building out data centre infrastructure as it races to roll out competitive AI technologies.
The agreement with Corning also builds on tech giants’ push to beef up domestic manufacturing capacity under President Donald Trump’s administration.
The social media giant, which has struggled in Silicon Valley’s AI race, has committed to spend about $600 billion in U.S. tech infrastructure and jobs over the next three years.
Earlier this month, it also announced its “Meta Compute” initiative to expand AI infrastructure and oversee its global fleet of data centers and supplier partnerships.
The agreement will aid Corning’s projection to boost its employment levels in North Carolina by 15% to 20% and support its workforce of more than 5,000 people in the state, the companies said.
“Together with Meta, we’re strengthening domestic supply chains and helping ensure that advanced data centers are built using U.S. innovation,” Corning CEO Wendell Weeks said.
Both Meta and Corning are due to report their quarterly results on Wednesday.
Published – January 28, 2026 10:53 am IST