Nasal nanodrops carrying gold-based spherical nucleic acids can slip into the brain and activate powerful immune pathways that target glioblastoma. In mice, the treatment cleared tumors and produced long-lasting protection when used with T-cell-boosting drugs. Noninvasive Nanomedicine Breakthrough for Deadly Brain Cancer Researchers at Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis, working with partners […]
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Disrupting the chemical messages that oral bacteria use to coordinate growth may help prevent disease by keeping plaque communities in a healthier state. Like all living things, bacteria adapt in order to survive. Over time, many have become resistant to widely used antibiotics and disinfectants, creating growing challenges for healthcare and sanitation. At the same […]
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A new study from Aarhus University shows that the updated Nordic dietary guidelines, designed to support both human and planetary health, are linked to increased longevity. A new study from Aarhus University reports that the new Nordic dietary guidelines, which aim to support both human health and environmental well-being, are linked to a longer lifespan. […]
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The Google CEO was speaking about the company’s recent Gemini 3 model and Nano Banana Pro image generator rollout [File]
| Photo Credit: REUTERS
Google CEO Sundar Pichai on November 25 hailed the potential of AI-powered “vibe coding” for untrained coders and basic users, but also highlighted the importance of having experts contribute their inputs.
During an episode of the ‘Google for Developers’ podcast with Logan Kilpatrick from Google DeepMind, Mr. Pichai confirmed that he did some vibe coding, or a form of coding supported by Generative AI where the user submits commands in their natural language in order to generate or tweak code across languages.
While this allows untrained coders to also carry out tasks such as designing websites, creating apps, or turning data into visuals, experts are warning that vibe coding has made it easier to automate cyber attacks.
The Google CEO was speaking about the company’s recent Gemini 3 model and Nano Banana Pro image generator rollout, which have received favourable reviews from users worldwide.
Calling vibe coding “exciting,” Mr. Pichai shared how more people were able to submit code for the first time or show others more developed and coded versions of their ideas instead of just a concept. This included Google employees using the company’s AI products both at work and in their personal lives, according to him.
He praised the accessibility of AI coding tools but also stressed on the importance of experts to ensure accuracy and security.
“It’s making coding so much more enjoyable, right? Like, of course I’m not working on large code bases where you have to really get it right; the security has to be there, so you know…those people should weigh in, but I feel things are getting more approachable. It’s getting exciting again. And the amazing thing is it’s only going to get better now,” explained Mr. Pichai.
Aside from AI-powered coding, Mr. Pichai expressed he was looking forward to the Gemini roadmap and praised the company’s AI-powered research assistant Notebook, promising there was “a lot more to come.”
Published – November 29, 2025 02:34 pm IST
The layoff numbers varied by business unit and performance ratings and could reach as high as 40% for some teams, two of the people said [File]
| Photo Credit: REUTERS
China’s Baidu started layoffs this week that will hit multiple business units, six sources briefed on the matter said, as the company struggles with intensifying competition in artificial intelligence and declining advertising revenue.
The move by the company, which runs China’s largest search engine, comes shortly after it reported a third-quarter loss on November 18. The sources added that the layoffs were expected to run until the end of this year. Reuters was not able to establish the companywide number of jobs being cut but the sources said it was internally perceived to be large-scale.
The layoff numbers varied by business unit and performance ratings and could reach as high as 40% for some teams, two of the people said.
The mobile ecosystem group will bear the brunt of the cuts, two sources said.
However, roles tied to AI and cloud computing will largely be protected, said four of the people. One of the sources said more resources would be directed to AI. The sources declined to be named as the information is private.
Baidu’s workforce stood at 35,900 at the end of last year, down from 39,800 in 2023 and 41,300 a year earlier, according to its annual reports. Baidu did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
The cuts follow Baidu’s second straight quarterly revenue decline; total revenue fell 7% and online advertising revenue dropped 18% in the third quarter. It also posted a loss of 11.23 billion yuan ($1.59 billion) for the period.
Baidu has spent years investing in AI, but those efforts have yet to revive growth in its core online advertising business, which has ceded market share to social media platforms like RedNote and ByteDance’s Douyin.
Although Baidu was the first major Chinese tech firm to roll out a ChatGPT-style service in 2023, it has struggled to maintain an early lead against competitors including Alibaba and AI start-up DeepSeek.
Baidu’s Ernie large language model is trailing offerings from rivals including Alibaba and DeepSeek after multiple strategy shifts, including a move to open source it earlier this year.
Adoption has also lagged. In September, Baidu’s Ernie Bot app had 10.77 million monthly active users, lower than 150 million for ByteDance’s Doubao and 73.4 million for DeepSeek, according to AI product tracker Aicpb.com.
Baidu has focused its AI push on embedding the technology into existing products, including search, and says more than half of its mobile search result pages now include AI-generated content.
Job reductions have become a common tool for major Chinese internet companies seeking to cut costs in a highly competitive sector.
Alibaba and Tencent slashed tens of thousands of jobs in 2022 to cope with a broad regulatory crackdown on China’s major internet platforms. In addition, several tech companies in the U.S. like Amazon and IBM are cutting thousands of jobs globally.
Published – November 29, 2025 09:30 am IST
The probes, due to be completed in a year, could see both services designated as gatekeepers under the EU’s Digital Markets Act [File]
| Photo Credit: REUTERS
Alphabet’s Google on Friday dropped its EU antitrust complaint about rival Microsoft’s cloud computing practices, a week after EU regulators launched an investigation to see if Microsoft should be subject to rules aimed at curbing its power in this sector. Last year, Google took its grievance to the European Commission, alleging that Microsoft’s anti-competitive practices locked customers into Microsoft’s cloud platform Azure.
Amazon leads the cloud computing market with a 30% share, followed by Microsoft at 20% and Google at 13%.
“Today, we are withdrawing it (Microsoft complaint) in light of the recent announcement that the EC will assess problematic practices affecting the cloud sector under a separate process,” Giorgia Abeltino, senior director for Google Cloud Europe, said in a blog post.
“We continue to work with policymakers, customers, and regulators across the EU, the UK, and elsewhere to advocate for choice and openness in the cloud market,” she said. The Commission, which acts as the EU competition enforcer, is investigating whether certain features of the cloud sector may be reinforcing Microsoft Azure and Amazon Web Services’ market power.
The probes, due to be completed in a year, could see both services designated as gatekeepers under the EU’s Digital Markets Act, subject to a list of dos and don’ts aimed at opening up markets to rivals and giving users more choices.
Published – November 29, 2025 10:25 am IST
A U.S. military plane soared over Florida’s Eglin Air Force Base earlier this month and released a drone made by the defense tech giant Anduril Industries to test whether it could take flight and conduct surveillance.
The drone – a winged model known as Altius – nosedived 8,000 feet into the ground, according to an Air Force test summary, reported here for the first time. Shortly afterwards, a second Altius drone spiraled to earth during a separate test, the summary said.
Anduril has become one of Silicon Valley’s hottest defense bets as drones reshape warfare in Ukraine and U.S. President Donald Trump pushes the Pentagon to adopt cutting-edge technologies to counter China. The company has ridden a surge of investment into military tech that has helped its valuation more than triple since late 2022 to $30.5 billion. Anduril has described its Altius drone, which can be used for surveillance and carry munitions, as battle-ready and says it has sent hundreds to Ukraine since Russia’s full-scale invasion started in 2022.
The company says Altius can launch from ground, air, or sea and, depending on the model, offer long-range strike capabilities or the ability to fly for hours. Anduril’s 33-year-old founder Palmer Luckey said in March that Altius drones have “taken out hundreds of millions of dollars worth of Russian targets.” In August, he traveled to Taiwan to deliver the company’s first batch of the drones there. Taiwan’s army told Reuters it had received 131 Anduril drones this year and declined to comment on the performance of the equipment.
But the previously undisclosed failure of the two Altius drones during the Air Force tests this month, as well as setbacks for Anduril’s Ghost drone program – including in Ukraine – highlight a gap between the U.S. company’s claims of battlefield readiness and the performance of some of its drones in testing and combat, according to interviews with more than a dozen people, including former Anduril staff, military officials, and people working with drones on the Ukrainian battlefield.
Western drone makers, including Anduril, have had limited impact so far on the battlefield in Ukraine. Mykhailo Fedorov, a deputy prime minister of Ukraine, said on Telegram in November 2024 that of one million drones deployed to the front lines that year, 96% were Ukrainian-made.
Shannon Prior, an Anduril spokesperson, said the incidents documented by Reuters are “isolated examples” across hundreds of tests.
“We are constantly proving out new capabilities for all of our systems, pushing them to the limit so that we can learn, iterate, and improve our systems,” she said. “Test failures are a natural – and intentional – part of that process.”
Prior added the Altius has previously flown “more than 2,000 hours” in tests, demonstrations and deployments, without providing details of what the results of those tests were.
Reuters could not determine how many Altius test flights have resulted in failures.
After the news agency contacted Anduril for comment, the company posted a blog detailing testing issues related to the Altius and Ghost drones, in addition to its command and control software, Lattice. “Those failures, and the learning they afford, are an essential and unavoidable part of the development process,” the company said.
A spokesperson for the Air Force Special Operations Command confirmed the Altius demonstration occurred this month but declined to comment further. On the same day as the Air Force demo, the Pentagon announced another purchase of Altius drones worth up to $50 million, part of a contract for “testing, training and supportability” of the drones.
The Armed Forces of Ukraine declined to comment on the performance of Anduril’s equipment, saying the effectiveness of weapons and military technology is restricted information, citing laws covering state secrets.
Anduril has a rapidly growing portfolio of weapons systems in development, spanning an autonomous warship it is co-developing with Hyundai to the “Fury,” a large drone designed to fly alongside manned fighter jets.
“We’re going to move fast, build what works and get it into the hands of the people who need it,” Luckey said during a speech in Taiwan this summer.
But Anduril’s setbacks underscore a broader challenge: America’s defense industry, long defined by costly world-class systems such as jets, missiles and aircraft carriers, must adapt to a battlefield where
cheap, mass-produced drone shave become central to modern warfare.
The Pentagon didn’t respond to a comment request.
The war in Ukraine has provided an opportunity for the company to battle-test and promote its products as it looks to boost its business with the Pentagon and with Taiwan. The company sent about 40 models of its Ghost drone, which looks like a miniature helicopter and can be used for reconnaissance, to Ukraine early in the conflict that began in 2022, according to a source with direct knowledge of the matter. But the initial model struggled to withstand Russian electronic warfare, frustrating Ukrainian soldiers, according to four people familiar with the matter. The person with direct knowledge of the matter said the company misunderstood how both terrain and Russia’s jamming of satellite-based navigation systems could derail flight plans.
Anduril spokesperson Prior said “everyone was having problems” with jamming from the outset of the war. She said that Anduril’s “teams work side by side with end users every day to capture feedback, push software updates in real time, and adapt systems under combat conditions.”
Prior said an updated model, the Ghost X, was delivered to the frontlines in Ukraine in December 2023 and “proved that the lessons learned earlier in the year were addressed.”
But the Ghost X has also had issues in more recent tests. A video shared with Reuters and separately posted in January 2025 on US ArmyWTF, an Instagram account run by an Army veteran, showed a Ghost model spinning out of control before crash landing near soldiers in an unidentified location. “I told you this would be a clusterfuck,” said one unidentified person in the video.
Reuters verified the footage as having been recorded during a weeks-long U.S. Army exercise in Hohenfels, Germany that began in mid-January, and included use of the Ghost X.
Anduril said the incident occurred due to an issue with a rotor and said it was fixed.
Major Geoffrey Carmichael, a spokesperson for the U.S. Army’s 10th Mountain Division that was involved in the exercise, said that when units are experimenting with new technologies such as drones “hard landings, system failures, and weather-related impacts can occur.” Of the Ghost X specifically, Carmichael said the drone “demonstrated strong performance in cold, high-altitude, and hot-weather environments” but that units identified areas for improvement, “particularly power management in extreme cold.”
Anduril, in its blog post, said U.S. Army units had “consistently praised” the reliability of Ghost X.
Anduril initially sent about 100 Altius drones to Ukraine in 2023, according to two sources. In March of this year, the UK Ministry of Defence announced a £30 million (about $40 million) contract paid for by a UK-led international fund to send an undisclosed number of Altius drones to Ukraine.
Britain’s Defense Ministry told Reuters the deal was to provide advanced Altius drones to Ukraine to tackle Russian aggression in the Black Sea. It said the Altius drones were recently delivered to the Ukrainian Navy, “who have expressed their satisfaction with them.”
The Ukrainian Armed Forces didn’t provide further comment.
Anduril told Reuters it has “shipped hundreds of Anduril systems to Ukraine” and that “they’ve proven effective against a large number of high-value enemy assets.” In September, Luckey posted a photo on X showing him carrying a large metal case with the caption: “Loading up and shipping out another truckload of leverage for Ukraine!” The post did not specify what was in the box. The company has recently indicated it may be more open about its testing results. Earlier this month, Luckey asked his followers on X if the company should share more “behind the scenes.”
Two days later, after making an announcement revealing a new high-end hovering drone called Omen, which the company has said is built for surveillance missions, the company posted a video on X of it crash landing into the dirt – accompanied by the words “developmental learnings.”
So-called gatekeepers have to adhere to a strict set of rules on moderation of content [File]
| Photo Credit: REUTERS
The European Commission said on Friday that Apple’s Apple Ads and Apple Maps likely meet the thresholds to be considered “gatekeepers” as defined by the Digital Markets Act, a designation the U.S. tech giant immediately disputed.
So-called gatekeepers have to adhere to a strict set of rules on moderation of content, allowing fair competition and making it easier for consumers to switch between services.
The DMA designates companies with more than 45 million monthly active users and 75 billion euros ($79 billion) in market capitalisation as gatekeepers, which provide a core platform service for business users.
The EU Commission said notifications from Apple had shown the platforms met the thresholds set for this designation. The Commission has 45 working days to decide whether to designate Apple as a gatekeeper for any of these services and if designated, Apple will have six months to comply.
Apple said in a response on Friday that it had submitted official rebuttals to the predesignation notification.
“We look forward to further explaining to the European Commission why Apple Maps and Apple Ads should not be designated,” it said in a statement.
It said Apple Ads is not a large player in the online advertising services market in the EU, and has minimal share compared to rivals such as Google, Meta, Microsoft, TikTok or X.
Apple’s App Store, iOS operating system and Safari web browser were designated core platform services under the DMA two years ago, meaning they are considered as gateways for businesses to reach users.
Published – November 29, 2025 10:27 am IST
Amazon and Flipkart operate apps that rank among the top 10 platforms used to make payments via India’s Unified Payments Interface [File]
| Photo Credit: REUTERS
Amazon is preparing to offer loans to small businesses in India, while Walmart-owned Flipkart is looking at buy-now, pay-later (BNPL) products as the e-commerce giants take on the country’s banks with a push into financial products.
Amazon acquired Bengaluru-based non-bank lender Axio earlier this year. Currently focused on BNPL and personal loans, Axio will re-embark on offering credit for small businesses and start offering cash management solutions.
“We see tremendous headroom for expanding credit growth in India, particularly among digitally engaged customers and small businesses outside of the top (cities),” Mahendra Nerurkar, vice president for payments for emerging markets at Amazon, told Reuters.
He added the company would be “designing tailored lending propositions” for merchants and small businesses to improve cash flow management efficiency and unlock capital.
The details of Amazon’s plans have not been previously reported.
Flipkart, in which Walmart has a stake of about 80%, registered its non-bank lending arm, Flipkart Finance, in March and is awaiting the Reserve Bank of India’s final approval for its business plans.
Company filings show two types of planned pay-later offerings: no-cost monthly installment loans for online shoppers over 3 to 24 months, and loans for consumer durables at 18%–26% interest rate per annum.
Interest rates on loans for consumer durables from traditional lenders typically range between 12% and 22%.
Flipkart expects to start offering these financial products next year, according to a source with direct knowledge of its plans.
The source was not authorised to speak to media and declined to be identified. Flipkart and the RBI did not respond to requests for comment.
India’s consumer loan market has grown from nearly $80 billion in March 2020 to around $212 billion as of March 2025, according to data from credit bureau CRIF High Mark, although there have been signs of a slowdown in recent quarters.
Consumer loans include unsecured personal loans, credit cards and loans for consumer durables.
Both Amazon and Flipkart operate apps that rank among the top 10 platforms used to make payments via India’s Unified Payments Interface.
Their financial ambitions gained a major boost earlier this year, when the RBI allowed them to lend directly to customers through wholly owned units. That also marked a significant opening of India’s financial services market to foreign-backed tech firms.
“There is immense potential for them to make a dent because they own both the supply-side and demand-side customer data,” said Rohan Lakhiyar, partner at consultancy Grant Thornton Bharat’s financial services risk division.
“But execution will be key as they venture beyond core retail.”
Amazon has also tied up with half a dozen local lenders to offer fixed deposit savings products with minimum amounts of 1,000 rupees ($11) to customers on its Amazon Pay platform, Nerurkar said.
Published – November 29, 2025 09:48 am IST
Cyber Monday is expected to be the season’s biggest online shopping day again, Adobe projects, driving $14.2 billion in spending, up 6.3% from last year [File]
| Photo Credit: REUTERS
U.S. shoppers spent $8.6 billion online on Black Friday, an Adobe Analytics report showed, as more consumers turned to laptops and phones instead of braving brisk weather to snap up deals during the holiday shopping weekend.
Online spending rose 9.4% through 6:30 p.m. ET (1130 GMT) on Black Friday compared with last year, according to Adobe Inc.’s data and insights arm, which vets e-commerce transactions, covering more than 1 trillion visits to U.S. retail sites.
Consumers were expected to flock to stores, but the bargain-chasing was subdued on post-Thanksgiving morning as shoppers fear overspending amid persistent inflation, trade policy-driven uncertainty, and a soft labor market.
However, the data firm expects consumers will spend between $11.7 billion and $11.9 billion on Friday, following a final tally, and said it will set a new record for online sales on Black Friday.
It anticipates consumers will spend $5.5 billion on Saturday, which represents growth of 3.8% from last year, and $5.9 billion on Sunday, a rise of 5.4%, as discounts remain elevated.
Cyber Monday is expected to be the season’s biggest online shopping day again, Adobe projects, driving $14.2 billion in spending, up 6.3% from last year.
Adobe, which earlier forecast Black Friday online sales rising 8.3% to $11.7 billion, last month said it expects U.S holiday online sales to grow at a slower pace this year.
Published – November 29, 2025 09:08 am IST