A rare genetic finding shows that GRIN2A mutations can directly trigger psychiatric illness. Early treatment insights point to new paths for intervention. For many years, scientists believed that conditions such as schizophrenia, anxiety disorders, or depression developed through a combination of numerous influences, including heredity. A new international study led by the Institute of Human […]
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Researchers studying pro fighters discovered that repeated head impacts can overload and eventually weaken the brain’s waste-disposal network. MRI biomarkers showed that cognitively impaired athletes initially had unusually high glymphatic activity that later collapsed with continued trauma. This decline may accelerate the buildup of harmful proteins tied to dementia. Glymphatic Decline From Repeated Head Impacts […]
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Part of efforts to protect the public from rising scams, the tech giants must block or filter accounts and group chats that mimic Singapore government agency identities [File]
| Photo Credit: AP
Singapore police have ordered Apple and Google to prevent scams impersonating government agencies on their messaging platforms, the city-state’s home affairs ministry said Tuesday.
Part of efforts to protect the public from rising scams, the tech giants must block or filter accounts and group chats that mimic Singapore government agency identities on Apple’s iMessage and Google Messages by the end of November, the ministry said in a statement.
It added that Apple and Google “have indicated that they will comply” with the order, which also demands changes to how profile names of unknown senders are displayed.
Government agencies have been using the “gov.sg” message ID to help recipients verify legitimate communication, but scammers have been using it, too, exploiting the lack of some safeguards on messaging platforms.
The home affairs ministry said there was “a need to put in place measures to deter the abuse of iMessage and Google Messages by scammers”.
If the companies fail to comply, they could face fines of up to one million Singapore dollars ($768,000).
Google said it was “collaborating with the government to implement pre-emptive measures to help prevent the spoofing of government agencies’ names” on its messaging platform.
“We share Singapore’s goal of keeping Singaporeans safe online,” Google told AFP in a statement.
Apple could not immediately be reached for comment.
On Facebook, Singapore police had already ordered parent company Meta to clamp down on a growing number of scammers pretending to be government officials.
Published – November 26, 2025 09:24 am IST
FILE PHOTO: The U.S. Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) said it is probing Amazon after one of its delivery drones downed an internet cable in central Texas last week.
| Photo Credit: Reuters
The U.S. Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) said on Tuesday it is probing Amazon after one of its delivery drones downed an internet cable in central Texas last week.
“A MK30 drone struck a wire line in Waco, Texas, around 12:45 p.m. local time on Tuesday, November 18,” the regulator said in a statement to Reuters, adding that it “is investigating” this incident.
The National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB) said the agency is not investigating the incident. Amazon did not immediately respond to a Reuters request for comment.
The e-commerce major confirmed the incident to CNBC, which first reported it, saying that after clipping the internet cable, the drone performed a “safe contingent landing”, adding that there were no injuries.
Video footage reviewed by the network showed one of Amazon’s MK30 drones ascending from a customer’s yard when one of its six propellers became entangled in a utility line. The drone’s motors subsequently shut down, resulting in a controlled descent.
This comes after the NTSB and FAA said in October that they would investigate a separate incident in which two Amazon Prime Air drones collided with a crane boom in Arizona.
Amazon began delivering prescription medications by drones in partnership with Amazon Pharmacy to customers in College Station, Texas in 2023.
The e-commerce firm aims to deliver 500 million packages annually by drone by the end of 2030.
Published – November 26, 2025 10:08 am IST
Larry Humphreys, a retired Federal Emergency Management Agency worker in Moultrie, Georgia, says he and his wife won’t be traveling much next year after their monthly health insurance premium payment increases more than 40%, to $938.
Humphreys, 68, feels betrayed by the Federal Employees Health Benefits Program. “As federal employees we sacrificed good salaries in the private sector because we thought the benefits from government would be better now, in retirement,” he said.
As the nation’s largest employer-sponsored health insurance program, the FEHB Program covers more than 8.2 million federal government employees and retirees, and it was once celebrated as a national model for controlling costs while giving enrollees many health plan options.
But next year, average enrollee premium payments in the system are set to jump more than 12%, on top of a 13.5% hike in 2025. The two-year increase is higher than what many private employers and their workers are experiencing.
The FEHB rate hikes are similar to those for plans sold on the Affordable Care Act exchanges — excluding the government subsidies most enrollees get, a major point of contention on Capitol Hill. The premiums insurers charge for Obamacare plans are rising 26% on average for 2026, following a 4% increase this year.
What’s making the latest hike in FEHB premium payments even harder to stomach for millions of federal employees is its timing: The 2026 increase was announced in October, when many federal workers were on unpaid furlough during the 43-day government shutdown.
Unlike most private employers, the FEHB Program gives its enrollees numerous health plans to choose from. That allows some people to lower their monthly premium payments by switching to plans with higher deductibles or copayments. But each year only about 5% of enrollees switch plans, according to the Office of Personnel Management, which oversees the program.
Humphreys, who has stayed with the same health plan for decades despite steadily higher prices, said it’s difficult determining which plan is best based on their health conditions. He has glaucoma and diabetes, and his wife, Julianne, has faced heart issues.
Their FEHB plan covers costs for their care not covered by Medicare, which typically pays 80% of their health bills.
“There’s a fear that if you do something and change plans and it’s wrong, you could be in a bad spot,” he said.
Open enrollment for federal employees and retirees runs through Dec. 8.
Among the factors causing premiums to increase, according to OPM, are an aging federal workforce with more chronic conditions, as well as prescription drug use, including pricey GLP-1 medications for weight loss.
About 42% of federal employees are over the age of 50, compared with 33% in the general workforce, OPM says. About 7% of federal employees are under the age of 30, compared with about 20% of workers overall.
OPM officials said the Trump administration’s policies aimed at lowering drug costs and focused on prevention of costly medical conditions will hopefully help it control premiums in the future.
“None of these initiatives of course will happen overnight – turning a $79 billion ship takes slow and steady progress,” Shane Stevens, OPM’s associate director for health care and insurance, said in a news release. “But, we are committed to improving the quality of life and quality of care for our members while also ensuring that healthcare remains accessible and affordable for those who work (or have worked) for the American people.”
OPM didn’t respond to requests for comment.
John Holahan, a health policy fellow at the nonpartisan Urban Institute, said OPM’s explanation left out a key reason for rising premiums: hospital consolidation. While the FEHB Program is a collection of health plans, in many markets — including the Washington, D.C., area — those insurers must negotiate with a handful of powerful health systems that have bought up other hospitals and doctors. That market power enables them to drive prices higher on FEHB plans, he said.
Jacqueline D. Bowens, president and CEO of the D.C. Hospital Association, said in a statement that “the costs borne by patients are not determined solely by the care they receive, but by how insurance companies choose to price, reimburse, and restrict access to that care.”
Holahan said it’s surprising that FEHB premiums are rising even faster than those of other, smaller employers. But he is not surprised federal employees don’t switch plans more often, even when it may be in their financial interest.
“It’s that people find the health care world so complicated,” he said. Holahan, a noted health economist, said he, too, finds it daunting to switch Medicare health plans.
Mike Lindquist, a scientific review officer for the National Institutes of Health, said he’s not happy with the rise in his premium payments the past two years. “It’s tough, as it’s a big expense.”
Lindquist, 43, who lives in Brunswick, Maryland, has been on the same Blue Cross and Blue Shield plan through the FEHB Program the past few years even though he evaluates his options each fall.
“By not switching, you don’t have to worry about choosing a new plan that might not take your practitioners,” he said.
Jonathan Foley, a health consultant who worked as a senior adviser at OPM during the Biden administration, said premium increases will be a hardship for many enrollees. While the FEHB Program offers 200 health plans in total, with about 10 to 20 in each geographic market, enrollment is concentrated in just a handful of Blue Cross and Blue Shield plans.
“This concentration reduces competition and gives outsize influence” to rate increases by Blue Cross and Blue Shield, Foley said in an email.
He said the FEHB Program also faces higher costs because it requires its health plans to cover GLP-1 medications, such as Wegovy and Ozempic. Nationally, fewer than half of large employers offer this benefit, according to the Peterson Center on Healthcare and KFF. KFF is a health information nonprofit that includes KFF Health News.
Another cost pressure has been more members using behavioral health benefits to treat depression and anxiety since the start of the covid pandemic, Foley said.
The Trump administration’s federal workforce reductions also have contributed to cost increases, Foley said. OPM has lost about a third of its employees in the past year, leaving fewer workers to oversee the FEHB Program and negotiate with dozens of health insurers, he said.
“The workforce reductions and the unpredictable nature of policymaking in the Trump administration has created considerable uncertainty among health insurance carriers,” Foley said. “The response of actuaries to increased uncertainty is to raise rates.”
A Government Accountability Office report this year found that recent OPM staffing vacancies led to a suspension of fraud risk assessments in the FEHB Program.
John Hatton, staff vice president for policy and programs at an advocacy group called the National Active and Retired Federal Employees Association, said higher prices mean it’s critical for FEHB members to shop and compare plans for next year. “The program was designed to promote competition to mitigate and drive down costs,” he said.
Hatton said OPM surveys show the main reasons people don’t change plans is they are overwhelmed by their options and worried about making a mistake. Switching to a plan with even a slightly higher deductible, he said, could save people a few hundred dollars a month on premiums.
But Humphreys, the Georgia retiree, said he likes that his current plan comes with low out-of-pocket costs for him and his wife. They owed little money when his wife suffered a kidney stone infection and sepsis, which put her in the hospital for 12 days.
That reassurance will soon come at a higher cost: Their FEHB and Medicare premiums will take up more than half of his pension check next year after accounting for taxes.
“I can take a lower-premium plan, but it’s a gamble I am not willing to take,” he said.
Alibaba announced that its upgraded AI chatbot Qwen, which aims to rival OpenAI’s ChatGPT, recorded 10 million downloads in the first week after its public launch [File]
| Photo Credit: AP
China’s Alibaba Group posted a 34% jump in revenue from its cloud business in its most recent quarter, buoyed by the boom in artificial intelligence.
But overall revenue at the Chinese tech group for the July-September quarter increased by just 5% year-on-year to 247.8 billion yuan ($35 billion), and profit fell 52% from last year, as a fierce price war in China’s e-commerce landscape, including in the food delivery segment, eroded into short-term profitability. JD.com, its e-commerce rival, reported a 55% net profit drop in the same quarter.
Alibaba started out in e-commerce and later turned its focus to cloud and AI technologies. Earlier this year, it pledged to invest at least 380 billion yuan ($53 billion) in three years in advancing its cloud computing and AI infrastructure.
CEO Eddie Wu said in prepared remarks Tuesday that the group’s “significant” investments in AI had helped its revenue growth. The 34% cloud revenue growth was faster than the 26% increase in the April-June quarter.
The company added that demand for AI was “accelerating” and its “conviction in future AI demand growth is strong.” It also will probably end up investing more than the planned 380 billion yuan in AI to meet surging demand, Alibaba said Tuesday.
On Monday, Alibaba announced that its upgraded AI chatbot Qwen, which aims to rival OpenAI’s ChatGPT, recorded 10 million downloads in the first week after its public launch.
The company’s Hong Kong shares gained 2% Tuesday and just before the opening bell on the New York Stock Exchange, shares rose 2.4%. Shares have gained more than 90% so far this year, fueled by optimism over its progress in AI.
Chinese companies have been gaining ground in AI since tech startup DeepSeek upended the industry, raising doubts over the dominance in the sector of its U.S. rivals.
Recent earnings reports by other Chinese tech giants have been mixed.
Tencent, which rivals Alibaba in AI, this month reported a strong 15% year-on-year gain in its revenue for the July-September quarter. But Baidu, which also competes with Alibaba in AI development, recorded a 7% drop in revenue in the same quarter compared to last year.
Concerns among investors and analysts over an overblown AI bubble have also been growing, although strong earnings at Nvidia last week slightly eased worries.
Published – November 26, 2025 10:10 am IST
Previous work had already shown that channel state information (CSI) from WiFi signals can be used to identify people in a room but CSI is harder to obtain and needs specialised hardware and firmware.
| Photo Credit: Paul Hanaoka/Unsplash
Modern WiFi standards have a feature called beamforming that helps routers push signals more efficiently towards connected devices. To do this, phones and laptops regularly broadcast short reports describing how they ‘see’ the wireless channel. These reports are unencrypted and can be picked up by any other device in range.
Are these reports rich enough for someone to recognise who is moving through a room just from how their body disturbs the WiFi field? A new study by researchers at the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology in Germany has found the answer is ‘yes’.
Previous work had already shown that channel state information (CSI) from WiFi signals can be used to identify people in a room but CSI is harder to obtain and needs specialised hardware and firmware. Beamforming feedback information (BFI) is however available on off-the-shelf hardware. The authors thus treated BFI as a potentially more serious privacy risk and measured how far an attacker could go with it in a realistic setting.
They built a WiFi setup with two access points and four ‘listening’ perspectives, all operating in the 6 GHz band. They asked 197 volunteers to walk back and forth through the WiFi field normally, briskly, through a turnstile, and while carrying a backpack or a crate. The system recorded both BFI and CSI traces, which the team then fed into a relatively simple neural network that could learn patterns directly from the raw data.
Thus they found that BFI alone was strongly identifying. When the model was trained and tested on normal walks, it recognised more than 160 individuals with 99.5% accuracy. CSI, which has higher time resolution but is harder to obtain in practice, was less accurate on the same dataset.
The model also transferred reasonably well across walking styles: BFI could still identify people when they wore a backpack, carried a crate, walked faster or passed through a turnstile, although the performance dipped somewhat for more unusual motions. It also outperformed CSI.
Per the researchers, the results change how we should think about the privacy consequences of everyday WiFi use. They’ve shown that inferring one’s identity doesn’t necessarily require hacking firmware or networks but only a device within listening range. They don’t even need the WiFi password.
The ability is doubly insidious because BFI is produced by normal Wifi networks and, unlike CCTV cameras, doesn’t advertise its role in surveillance. People who might avoid visible cameras might still ignore access points mounted in ceilings or corners. In this sense, WiFi-based tracking can create an ‘inverse panopticon’ where individuals behave as if unobserved while being silently profiled.
Once a system can stably recognise individuals from their gait, any other WiFi-based task such as recognising activities or estimating occupancy can be linked to those identities. This makes the harm cumulative because activity and movement logs can be tied to the same person over time, even if their real-world name is not immediately known.
Finally, the researchers noted that current mitigation ideas like adding noise to training fields are immature, often require special hardware, and mainly target CSI instead of BFI.
Published – November 26, 2025 10:15 am IST
iQOO 15 running Snapdragon 8 Elite Gen 5 and OriginOS 6 launched in India
| Photo Credit: Special Arrangement
Chinese smartphone maker iQOO on Wednesday (November 26, 2025) launched its flagship smartphone iQOO 15 in India. The new iQOO 15 is the third smartphone running Snapdragon 8 Elite Gen 5 here and competes with OnePlus 15 and Realme GT 8 Pro.
iQOO 15 is also the first among Vivo and iQOO phones to run their newly unveiled skin, OriginOS 6, replacing FuntouchOS, based on Android 16 out of the box.
iQOO 15 uses a 6.85-inch Samsung’s 2K M14 LEAD OLED display with a peak brightness of 6,000 nits and a 144 Hz refresh rate. Further, iQOO 15 also supports Dolby Vision. It bears IP68 and IP69 ratings for water and dust resistance.
iQOO 15 ships with a 7,000 mAh battery supported by a 100W fast charger inside the box along with 40W wireless charging support. The company also claims that it will have India’s largest 8K VC cooling system for better thermal management.
The iQOO 15 runs on Snapdragon 8 Elite Gen 5 with up to 16 GB LPDDR5x Ultra RAM and 512 GB UFS 4.1 storage. On top of it, the new phone will use a Q3 chip for gaming performance, and also supports ray tracing. The company will provide 5 OS and 7 years of security updates to iQOO 15.
iQOO 15 sports a triple 50 MP camera system with a 50 MP Sony IMX921 VCS main sensor, a 50 MP Sony IMX882 periscope telephoto lens with 3x optical and 100x digital zoom, and a 50MP ultrawide camera. It has a 32 MP front camera.
The iQOO 15 comes in Alpha Edition, featuring a matte black finish and Legend Edition, paired with tri-colour patterned logo.
The iQOO 15 starts at ₹72,999 for the 12GB/256GB variant and ₹79,999 for the 16GB/512GB variant. Sales start on December 1 on Amazon, the iQOO website, Vivo stores, and retail outlets.
Published – November 26, 2025 01:21 pm IST
FILE PHOTO: TSMC said it had filed a lawsuit in Taiwan’s Intellectual Property and Commercial Court against its former Senior Vice President Wei-Jen Lo, who recently joined Intel.
| Photo Credit: Reuters
Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co said on Tuesday it had filed a lawsuit in Taiwan’s Intellectual Property and Commercial Court against its former Senior Vice President Wei-Jen Lo, who recently joined Intel.
In an emailed statement, TSMC said the lawsuit is based on the terms of the employment contract between TSMC and Lo, the non-compete agreement signed by Lo, and regulations such as the Trade Secrets Act.
“There is a high probability that Lo uses, leaks, discloses or transfers TSMC’s trade secrets and confidential information to Intel, thus making legal actions necessary,” TSMC said.
Intel and Lo did not immediately respond to requests for comment.
Taiwan’s economy ministry said in a statement that it respects TSMC’s legal action and will closely monitor the impact on the industry.
The ministry added that it will cooperate to determine whether the case involves the infringement of core technologies or violations of Taiwan’s National Security Act.
Last week, Taiwan’s economy minister said authorities were investigating Lo after local media reported that he may have taken TSMC’s advanced technology data to his new employer.
Lo, who helped drive TSMC’s mass production of cutting edge 5-nanometre, 3-nm and 2-nm chips, joined Intel in October after retiring from TSMC following a 21-year-long career there. A source familiar with the matter said he reports directly to Intel CEO Lip-Bu Tan.
Before joining TSMC in 2004, Lo worked at Intel for 18 years. He served as a director of technology development and was a factory manager, running Intel’s development facility in Santa Clara, California.
Published – November 26, 2025 10:25 am IST
OnePlus 15R to run Snapdragon 8 Gen 5 processor, launches on Dec 17 along with OnePlus Pad Go 2
| Photo Credit: Special Arrangement
Chinese smartphone maker OnePlus on Wednesday (November 26, 2025) confirmed that OnePlus 15R will run on Snapdragon 8 Gen 5 processor. The upcoming OnePlus 15R is going to be an ‘affordable’ option in the series featuring OnePlus 15 on top.
OnePlus 15R will sell in Charcoal Black and Mint Breeze shades. It will be an IP66, IP68, IP69 and IP69K rated smartphone.
OnePlus 15R is expected to ship with a 7,000 mAh battery supported by a 100W charger inside the box along with wireless and reverse charging support.
OnePlus 15R might use a 50 MP main camera in OnePlus 15R supported by an ultrawide lens and a telephoto camera. A 32 MP front camera is yet another possibility.
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OnePlus 15 will launch on December 17 in India along with OnePlus Pad Go 2, the second member of the OnePlus Pad Go series.
The OnePlus Pad Go 2 is going to target accessible tablet buyers in the mid-range segment. It will be available in Shadow Black and Lavender Drift. The Shadow Black variant will also be the first OnePlus tablet to feature 5G. OnePlus Pad Go 2 will ship with an in-box stylus.
Published – November 26, 2025 12:47 pm IST