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ByteDance now has to show that it’s making significant progress on a deal to sell TikTok to a US-based company.

Enrique Tarrio, the leader of the far-right Proud Boys, was among nearly 1,600 January 6 defendants who were either pardoned or had their sentences commuted. He is expected to be in Miami by Tuesday afternoon.

A report from Mark Gurman in Bloomberg makes the very reasonable suggestion that automatic email categorization in Apple Mail, already present since iOS 18 arrived on the iPhone, is coming to Macs and iPads in a few months. The feature should arrive with macOS 15.4 and possibly iPadOS 18.4, both due in April.

Similar to Google's server-side Gmail sorting, which debuted in May 2013, Apple's Mail app on iOS sorts email into categories: "Primary," "Transactions," "Updates," and "Promotions." Moving an email manually from one category to another generally fixes the categorization for that sender from then on. You cannot create new categories, however, or alter how Apple's sorting functions.

Some may prefer the simplicity of a single scroll of messages, versus having to check four separate inboxes to ensure that nothing got missorted or is more important than the label implies. I've used sorting on iOS and generally found it helpful, though I also use the Filters button in the lower-left corner on iOS to do a double-check of all the mail addressed specifically to me. On a Mac desktop, I'm partial to Mimestream, but that's because all my mail comes through Google/Workspace accounts. I'll be watching to see how Mail's sorting translates to macOS.

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The far right is celebrating what it views as a clear signal from the X owner and Donald Trump associate, who made the gestures on stage Monday.

For decades, we have been imaging the surface of Mars with ever-finer resolution, cataloging a huge range of features on its surface, studying their composition, and, in a few cases, dispatching rovers to make on-the-ground readings. But a catalog of what's present on Mars doesn't give us answers to what's often the key question: how did a given feature get there? In fact, even with all the data we have available, there are a number of major bits of Martian geography that have produced major academic arguments that have yet to be resolved.

In Monday's issue of Nature Geoscience, a team of UK-based researchers tackle a big one: Mars' dichotomy, the somewhat nebulous boundary between its relatively elevated southern half, and the low basin that occupies its northern hemisphere, a feature that some have proposed also served as an ancient shoreline. The new work suggests that the edge of the dichotomy was eroded back by hundreds of kilometers during the time when an ocean might have occupied Mars' northern hemisphere.

Close to the edge

To view the Martian dichotomy, all you need to do is color-code a relief map of the Martian surface, something that NASA has conveniently done for us. Barring a couple of enormous basins, the entire southern hemisphere of the red planet is elevated by a kilometer or more, and sits atop a far thicker crust. With the exception of the volcanic Tharsis region the boundary between these two areas runs roughly along the equator.

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When he launched his own cryptocurrency, Donald Trump produced unimaginable wealth from thin air. But it will come at a cost to someone.

When he launched his own cryptocurrency, Donald Trump produced unimaginable wealth from thin air. But it will come at a cost to someone.

Veterinarians in the Washington, DC region have been put on alert for any unusual illnesses in their non-human patients amid today's presidential inauguration—a nod to the significance of potential zoonotic bioterror threats.

In a recent letter to Virginia veterinarians, the state health department requested assistance in the "enhanced surveillance," while noting that, currently, there is no report of threats or bioterrorism-related illnesses.

"As with any large-scale public event, there will be heightened security, and the region will be on alert or signs of bioterrorism or other potential threats," the letter read. "Enhanced surveillance is being conducted out of an abundance of caution."

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The updated White House website now features a Donald Trump hype video complete with helicopters, saluting, fighter jets, and a bald eagle.

Fast and complex multi-finger movements generated by the hand exoskeleton. Credit: Shinichi Furuya Fast and complex multi-finger movements generated by the hand exoskeleton. Credit: Shinichi Furuya

When it comes to fine-tuned motor skills like playing the piano, practice, they say, makes perfect. But expert musicians often experience a "ceiling effect," in which their skill level plateaus after extensive training. Passive training using a robotic exoskeleton hand could help pianists overcome that ceiling effect, according to a paper published in the journal Science Robotics.

“I’m a pianist, but I [injured] my hand because of overpracticing,” coauthor Shinichi Furuya of Kabushiki Keisha Sony Computer Science Kenkyujo told New Scientist. “I was suffering from this dilemma, between overpracticing and the prevention of the injury, so then I thought, I have to think about some way to improve my skills without practicing.” Recalling that his former teachers used to place their hands over his to show him how to play more advanced pieces, he wondered if he could achieve the same effect with a robotic hand.

So Furuya et al. used a custom-made exoskeleton robot hand capable of moving individual fingers on the right hand independently, flexing and extending the joints as needed. Per the authors, prior studies with robotic exoskeletons focused on simpler movements, such as assisting in the movement of limbs stabilizing body posture, or helping grasp objects. That sets the custom robotic hand used in these latest experiments apart from those used for haptics in virtual environments.

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Spearheaded by the president's own memecoin, people including Donald Trump are rushing to cash in on Donald Trump’s inauguration and second term in office.

I have one standard rack appliance in my home: a Unifi Dream Machine Pro. It is mounted horizontally in a coat closet, putting it close to my home's fiber input and also incidentally keeping our jackets gently warm. I can fit juuuuuust about one more standard rack-size device in there (maybe a rack-mount UPS?) before I have to choose between outer-wear and overly ambitious networking. Were I starting over, I might think a bit more about scalability.

Along those lines, technologist and YouTube maker Jeff Geerling has launched the Project Mini Rack page for folks who have similarly server-sized ambitions, coupled with a lack of square footage. "I mean, if you want to cosplay as a sysadmin, you need a rack, right?" Geerling says in the announcement video. It's a keen launching point for a new "homelab" or "minilab" project, also known as bringing the networking and hardware challenges of a commercial network deployment into your home for "fun."

Project Mini Rack announcement video, from Jeff Geerling.

It's a good time fall into the compact computing space. As Geerling notes in a blog post announcing the project, there's a whole lot of small-form-factor PCs on the market. You can couple them with single-board computers, power-over-Ethernet devices, and network-accessible solid state drives that allow you to stuff a whole lab into a cube you can carry around in your hands.

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Our bodies rely on their lymphatic system to drain excessive fluids and remove waste from tissues, feeding those back into the blood stream. It’s a complex yet efficient cleaning mechanism that works in every organ except the brain. “When cells are active, they produce waste metabolites, and this also happens in the brain. Since there are no lymphatic vessels in the brain, the question was what was it that cleaned the brain,” Natalie Hauglund, a neuroscientist at Oxford University who led a recent study on the brain-clearing mechanism, told Ars.

Earlier studies done mostly on mice discovered that the brain had a system that flushed its tissues with cerebrospinal fluid, which carried away waste products in a process called glymphatic clearance. “Scientists noticed that this only happened during sleep, but it was unknown what it was about sleep that initiated this cleaning process,” Hauglund explains.

Her study found the glymphatic clearance was mediated by a hormone called norepinephrine and happened almost exclusively during the NREM sleep phase. But it only worked when sleep was natural. Anesthesia and sleeping pills shut this process down nearly completely.

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A marketing campaign brief obtained by WIRED reveals how the Chinese app is trying to capitalize on its sudden international popularity.

A marketing campaign brief obtained by WIRED reveals how the Chinese app is trying to capitalize on its sudden international popularity.

When ya gotta go, ya gotta go, and if it sometimes seems like the urge to pee seems more pressing when others nearby are letting loose—well, there's now a bit of science to back that up. It turns out that humans may not be the only species to experience "contagious urination," according to a new paper published in the journal Current Biology. Chimpanzees living at the Kumamoto Sanctuary in Japan are also more likely to relieve themselves when others are doing so nearby, and the behavior seems to be hierarchical, "flowing down" from dominant chimps to more passive ones.

“In humans, urinating together can be seen as a social phenomenon,” said coauthor Ena Onishi of Kyoto University. “An Italian proverb states, ‘Whoever doesn’t pee in company is either a thief or a spy’ (Chi non piscia in compagnia o è un ladro o è una spia), while in Japanese, the act of urinating with others is referred to as 'Tsureshon' (連れション). This behavior is represented in art across centuries and cultures and continues to appear in modern social contexts. Our research suggests that this phenomenon may have deep evolutionary roots.”

Onishi, et al decided to study the phenomenon after noticing that many chimps in the sanctuary seemed to synchronize when they peed, and they wondered whether the phenomenon might be similar to how one person yawning can trigger others to follow suit—another "semi-voluntary physiological behavior." There had been no prior research into contagious peeing. So they filmed the 20 captive chimps over 600 hours, documenting over 1,300 "urination events."

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From the flamboyant blossoms and birds of rainforests to the living rainbows of coral reefs, Earth’s surface is teeming with life. But some of its most diverse and fascinating biomes are thriving in the darkness below.

We used to think that the subsurface was a far-from-ideal place for living things. Habitats that can soak up light and warmth from the Sun have the energy to sustain many forms of life and so were viewed as the most diverse. That view is now changing.

Led by Emil Ruff of the Marine Biological Laboratory (MBL), Woods Hole, Mass., new research has unearthed communities of underground microbes that are almost as—and sometimes more—diverse than even reefs and rainforests. Ruff and his team found that subsurface bacteria and archaea are flourishing, even at depths where the energy supply is orders of magnitude lower than enjoyed by organisms in habitats that see the sun.

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TikTok disappeared for a portion of the weekend, following a Supreme Court decision that upheld a 2024 federal law requiring the app to cease operations in the US unless it was sold by its Chinese owner, ByteDance. TikTok is gradually resuming service in the US, but it has an unclear road ahead.

TikTok started greeting US users late Saturday night with a notice stating that "Sorry, TikTok isn't available right now," noting that "A law banning TikTok has been enacted in the US."

The message changed after it was first deployed, adding a note that "We are fortunate that President Trump has indicated that he will work with us on a solution to reinstate TikTok once he takes office. Please stay tuned!"

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