U.S. Rep. Jake Auchincloss read a speech on the floor of the U.S. House that was generated by AI chatbot ChatGPT. "Auchincloss said he prompted the system in part to 'write 100 words to deliver on the floor of the House of Representatives' about the legislation," reports the Associated Press. "Auchincloss said he had to refine the prompt several times to produce the text he ultimately read. His staff said they believe it's the first time an AI-written speech was read in Congress." From the report: The bill, which Auchincloss is refiling, would establish a joint U.S.-Israel AI Center in the United States to serve as a hub for AI research and development in the public, private and education sectors. Auchincloss said part of the decision to read a ChatGPT-generated text was to help spur debate on AI and the challenges and opportunities created by it. He said he doesn't want to see a repeat of the advent of social media, which started small and ballooned faster than Congress could react. "I'm the youngest parent in the Democratic caucus, AI is going to be part of my life and it could be a general purpose technology for my children," said Auchincloss, 34.

The text generated from Auchincloss's prompt includes sentences like: "We must collaborate with international partners like the Israeli government to ensure that the United States maintains a leadership role in AI research and development and responsibly explores the many possibilities evolving technologies provide." "There were probably about a dozen of my colleagues on the floor. I bet none of them knew it was written by a computer," he said. Lawmakers and others shouldn't be reflexively hostile to the new technology, but also shouldn't wait too long before drafting policies or new laws to help regulate it, Auchincloss said. In particular, he argued that the country needs a "public counterweight" to the big tech firms that would help guarantee that smaller developers and universities have access to the same cloud computing, cutting edge algorithms and raw data as larger companies.

New bills in the state House and Senate would not only pursue collective bargaining rights across companies, as with past measures, but would guarantee a minimum wage, paid sick leave and other benefits. Companies like Uber and Lyft would also have to cover some driver expenses and pour money into the government's unemployment insurance system. Engadget reports: The new legislation wouldn't decide whether drivers are employees or independent contractors. However, Senate bill co-sponsor Jason Lewis told the State House News Service his bill would establish requirements that apply regardless of a driver's status. Previous bills would have tasked workers with negotiating for benefits that are now included, Lewis says.

In a statement, the Service Employees International Union (a bill proponent) says the bill "rewrites the rules" and gives condition drivers have sought for over a decade. The Massachusetts Coalition for Independent Work, an industry-run organization that opposes the legislation, previously claimed that measures granting employee status don't reflect a "vast majority" of drivers that want to remain contractors. The coalition prefers bills that would bring the anti-employee ballot proposal to the legislature as well as create portable benefit accounts.

The government is considering introducing a "digital pound," the economic secretary to the Treasury has told MPs. From a report: The UK was committed to becoming a world crypto hub, Andrew Griffith said. And the government was "a long way down the road... to establish a regime for the wholesale use, for payment purposes, of stablecoins." Stablecoins are designed to have a predictable value linked to traditional currencies or assets such as gold.

The currency, for use by households and businesses, would sit alongside cash and bank deposits, rather than replacing them. A public consultation on the attributes of a digital pound would be launched in coming weeks, Mr Griffith told the Treasury Select Committee. "I want to see us establish a regime, and this is within the FSMB [Financial Services and Markets Bill, currently being debated in Parliament], for the wholesale use for payment purposes of stablecoins," he said. Central banks around the world are developing or exploring digital currencies.

China, for example, is a front-runner in this global race, and is in the process of testing a digital yuan in major cities including Beijing, Shanghai and Shenzhen. The European Central Bank in July 2021 took a first step towards launching a digital version of the euro, kicking off a 24-month investigation phase to be followed by three years of implementation. And Mr Griffith told the committee: "It is right to look to seek to embrace potentially disruptive technologies, particularly when we have such a strong fintech and financial sector."

Republicans in the House plan to scrutinize communications between the Biden administration and big technology and social-media companies to probe whether they amounted to the censorship of legitimate viewpoints on issues such as Covid-19 that ran counter to White House policy. WSJ: House Republicans are expected as soon as Tuesday to launch the Select Subcommittee on the Weaponization of the Federal Government. The panel is expected to seek to illuminate what some Republicans say have been efforts by the Biden administration to influence content hosted by companies such as Facebook parent Meta Platforms and Alphabet, owner of YouTube and Google.

The panel will examine, among other things, how the executive branch works with the private sector, nonprofit entities or other government agencies to "facilitate action against American citizens," such as alleged violations of their free-speech rights, according to a draft resolution to establish it. A White House spokesman dismissed the effort. "House Republicans continue to focus on launching partisan political stunts," said spokesman Ian Sams, "instead of joining the president to tackle the issues the American people care about most like inflation."

If humankind detects a message from an advanced civilisation, "It would be a transformative event for humankind," writes the Guardian, "one the world's nations are surely prepared for.

"Or are they?" "Look at the mess we made when Covid hit. We'd be like headless chickens," says Dr John Elliott, a computational linguist at the University of St Andrews. "We cannot afford to be ill-prepared, scientifically, socially, and politically rudderless, for an event that could happen at any time and which we cannot afford to mismanage."

This frank assessment of Earth's unreadiness for contact with life elsewhere underpins the creation of the Seti (Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence) post-detection hub at St Andrews. Over the next month or two, Elliott aims to bring together a core team of international researchers and affiliates. They will take on the job of getting ready: to analyse mysterious signals, or even artefacts, and work out every aspect of how we should respond.... "After the initial announcement, we'd be looking at societal impact, information dissemination, the media, the impact on religions and belief systems, the potential for disinformation, what analytical capabilities we'll need, and much more: having strategies in place, being transparent with everything we've discovered — what we know and what we do not know," says Elliott....

Lewis Dartnell, an astrobiologist and professor of science communication at the University of Westminster, said the new hub at St Andrews is "an important step in raising awareness at how ill-prepared we currently are" for detecting a signal from an alien civilisation. But he added that any intelligent aliens were likely to be hundreds if not thousands of light years away, meaning communication time would be on the scale of many centuries. "Even if we were to receive a signal tomorrow, we would have plenty of breathing space to assemble an international team of diverse experts to attempt to decipher the meaning of the message, and carefully consider how the Earth should respond, and even if we should.

"The bigger concern is to establish some form of international agreement to prevent capable individuals or private corporations from responding independently — before a consensus has formed on whether it is safe to respond at all, and what we would want to say as one planet," he said.

A new study published in the journal PLoS ONE has reported on the first human tests of an experimental therapy using sound and light to treat Alzheimer's disease (AD). New Atlas reports: Over the last seven years, Li-Huei Tsai and colleagues at MIT's Picower Institute for Learning and Memory have been investigating an unusual hypothesis. The researchers found toxic proteins associated with Alzheimer's disease could be eliminated from mouse brains following exposure to flickering lights. Further research found the magic frequency was 40 Hz. When animals were exposed to both sound and light at that frequency, improvements in brain health were detected. Of course, these kinds of animal tests don't mean much if they can't be replicated in humans, so after further investigations revealed how this sensory therapy could be affecting a mouse brain, the researchers started preliminary human experiments. Working with colleagues at Massachusetts General Hospital, two clinical trials set out to test the therapy in humans.

The first Phase 1 study recruited 43 participants to test whether this kind of light and sound exposure was safe, and did anything to the human brain. Each subject was monitored using EEG measures while experiencing a short exposure to what has been dubbed by the researchers as GENUS (Gamma ENtrainment Using Sensory stimulation). This preliminary study comprised both healthy and cognitively impaired subjects, as well as participants with epilepsy in order to evaluate the seizure potential of the treatment. After a short exposure to the sensory stimulation, the researchers found a number of brain regions synchronize with the 40-Hz frequency.

The second trial recruited 15 participants with early-stage Alzheimer's disease. Each participant was given a device to take home and use for around an hour a day. The device was essentially a small LED white board with an iPad in the middle and a soundbar underneath. While watching videos on the iPad, the LED light panel on the white board would flicker at a rate of 40 Hz and the soundbar would play a 40-Hz tone. Half the cohort was randomized to a sham control condition, exposed to a constant white light and white noise. Compliance was relatively high between both the GENUS and the sham groups, with participants completing the daily requirement of exposure around 90 percent of the time. After around three months of use the researchers could detect statistically significant differences between the two groups, both on brain imaging and memory tests. The researchers are cautious not to overstate their initial findings, the report says. "It's early days for human studies [...], larger cohorts of patients are needed to better understand the impacts of this sensory stimulation and longer trials will hopefully establish more prominent beneficial effects."

The European Union took a significant step toward completing a deal with the U.S. that would allow personal information about Europeans to be stored legally on U.S. soil, reducing the threat of regulatory action against thousands of companies that routinely transmit such information. From a report: The European Commission, the EU's executive arm, on Tuesday published a draft approval of the preliminary deal it struck in March with the U.S. government. The agreement would re-establish a framework that makes it easy for businesses to transfer such information again following the invalidation of a previous agreement by an EU court in 2020.

As part of the new deal, the U.S. is offering -- and has started to implement -- new safeguards on how its intelligence authorities can access that data. If concluded, the deal could resolve one of the thorniest outstanding issues between the two economic giants. Hanging in the balance has been the ability of businesses to use U.S.-based data centers to do things such as sell online ads, measure their website traffic or manage company payroll in Europe. Blocking data transfers could upend billions of dollars of trade from cross-border data activities, including cloud services, human resources, marketing and advertising, if they involve sending or storing information about Europeans on U.S. soil, tech advocates say.

An anonymous reader shares an excerpt from an opinion piece in Scientific American, written by Jason Wright. Wright is a professor of astronomy and astrophysics at Pennsylvania State University, where he is director of the Penn State Extraterrestrial Intelligence Center. From the piece: In August the White House announced (PDF) that the results of all federally funded research should be freely accessible by the end of 2025. This will be a big change for scientists in many fields but ultimately a good move for the democratization of research. Under this new guidance, many peer-reviewed papers would be free for the world to read immediately upon publication rather than stuck behind expensive paywalls, and the data that underlay these papers would be fully available and properly archived for anyone who wanted to analyze them. As an astronomer, I'm pleased that our profession has been ahead of the curve on this, and most of the White House's recommendations are already standard in our field.

NASA, as a federal agency that funds and conducts research, is onboard with the idea of freely accessible data. But it has a plan that goes much further than the White House's and that is highly problematic. The agency currently gives a proprietary period to some scientists who use particular facilities, such as a 12-month period for the powerful James Webb Space Telescope (JWST), so that those scientists can gather and analyze data carefully without fear of their work being poached. NASA is looking to end this policy in its effort to make science more open-access. Losing this exclusivity would be really bad for astronomy and planetary science. Without a proprietary period, an astronomer with a brilliant insight might spend years developing it, months crafting a successful proposal to execute it, and precious hours of highly competitive JWST time to actually perform the observations -- only to have someone else scoop up the data from a public archive and publish the result. This is a reasonable concern -- such scooping has happened before.

Without a proprietary period during which the astronomers who proposed given observations have exclusive access to the data, those researchers will have to work very quickly in order to avoid being scooped. Receiving credit for discoveries is especially important for early-career astronomers looking to establish their credentials as they search for a permanent job. Under such time pressure, researchers will need to cut corners, such as skipping the checks and tests that define careful work. Such a sloppy approach will lead to hasty results and incorrect conclusions to the detriment of the entire field. It also can lead to the erosion of work-life boundaries, with astronomers working long hours, sacrificing their health and family time so their result gets out before the competition's. This is bad for the culture of science and disproportionately affects those with children or other time-consuming personal circumstances (such as being a student, a caretaker or a full-time college instructor while also performing research). Allowing researchers to properly benefit from their work is critical for making astronomy as fair and equitable as possible. [...] "One potential alternative is to create a professional requirement that those who proposed an observation but have not published from it should be offered co-authorship on any paper that uses the data," suggests Wright, noting that it's "not currently the cultural norm in astronomy" and "comes with a whole host of complications."

"Another option is to change the standard for how credit is assigned for any observational work," adds Wright. "Astronomers could, for example, demand that any paper citing a result also cite the proposal that generated the enabling data. In this way, the proposal team could still accrue credit for its work, even if it wasn't the first to publish."

"In the end, though, such adjustments are secondary to the heart of the matter, which is that NASA's plan to eliminate the proprietary period for JWST data is bad for astronomy."

Three Chinese astronauts arrived on Wednesday at China's space station for the first in-orbit crew rotation in Chinese space history, launching operation of the second inhabited outpost in low-Earth orbit after the NASA-led International Space Station. Reuters reports: The spacecraft Shenzhou-15, or "Divine Vessel", and its three passengers lifted off atop a Long March-2F rocket from the Jiuquan Satellite Launch Centre at 11:08 p.m. (1508 GMT) on Tuesday in sub-freezing temperatures in the Gobi Desert in northwest China, according to state television. Shenzhou-15 was the last of 11 missions, including three previous crewed missions, needed to assemble the "Celestial Palace", as the multi-module station is known in Chinese. The first mission was launched in April 2021.

The spacecraft docked with the station more than six hours after the launch, and the three Shenzhou-15 astronauts were greeted with warm hugs from the previous Shenzhou crew from whom they were taking over. The Shenzhou-14 crew, who arrived in early June, will return to Earth after a one-week handover that will establish the station's ability to temporarily sustain six astronauts, another record for China's space program. The Shenzhou-15 mission offered the nation a rare moment to celebrate, at a time of widespread unhappiness over China's zero-COVID policies, while its economy cools amid uncertainties at home and abroad.

Methane traps about 80 times as much heat as carbon, the Washington Post points out. So Friday at the UN's Climate Change conference, America's Environmental Protection Agency "unveiled an updated proposal to regulate methane seeping from pipes and other equipment maintained by the U.S. oil and gas industry, the country's biggest industrial source of the potent greenhouse gas." The proposal, which was partially released during last year's climate conference in Glasgow, Scotland, would be the first time the federal government requires existing facilities to find and fix methane leaks. "These are critical, common sense standards that will protect workers, protect communities ... and make very sharp cuts in dangerous pollutants that threaten our planet," EPA Administrator Michael EPA [Administrator Michael] Regan said at a news conference in Egypt.

Under the proposal, the agency is seeking to compel oil and gas operators to use remote sensors to quickly address leaks and to require states to develop plans to curb methane from older wells. Gathering feedback from the industry over the past year, the EPA plans to offer companies more flexibility in how they monitor for leaks. Federal regulators will also establish a program to respond to blowouts and other "super-emitter" events, allowing third-party groups to help quickly identify major leaks. Officials say the regulations will reduce U.S. greenhouse gas emissions by one percentage point below 2005 levels, adding to the roughly 40 percent cut expected to come from the Inflation Reduction Act passed earlier this year. A methane fee program included in that legislation would require oil and gas to pay for all emissions above a certain threshold — providing an incentive for operators to abide by the new regulations, Regan said.

The rule should also help the country fulfill the "Global Methane Pledge" — a U.S.-backed effort to curb emissions of the potent greenhouse gas 30 percent by 2030. Although more than 100 nations have signed on to the pledge since it was launched in 2021, a recent World Meteorological Organization report found that methane emissions this year are rising faster than ever before...Three of the world's t op five methane emitters — China, India and Russia — have not joined the initiative....

The United Nations on Friday also announced the launch of a public satellite system to detect major methane releases from the power, waste and agricultural sectors.

Japan said on Friday it will invest up to 70 billion yen ($500 million) in a new semiconductor company led by tech firms including Sony and NEC as it rushes to re-establish itself as a lead maker of advanced chips. From a report: "Semiconductors are going to be a critical component for the development of new leading-edge technologies such as AI, digital industries and in healthcare," Minister of Economy, Trade and Industry Yasutoshi Nishimura said at a news briefing. The new chip company will be named Rapidus and aims to begin making chips in the second half of the decade, he added.

As trade friction between the United States and China deepens and Washington restricts Beijing's access to advanced semiconductor technology, Japan is rushing to revive its chip manufacturing base to ensure its carmakers and information technology companies do not run short of the key component. Japan is also concerned that China may attempt to take control of Taiwan, the global hub for advanced chip production.

A federal judge denied Elizabeth Holmes's bid for a new trial, the latest setback for the Theranos founder who was convicted of fraud in January. From a report: U.S. District Judge Edward Davila, who oversaw Ms. Holmes's trial which began last year, said in a ruling late Monday that the arguments in her three motions for a new trial didn't introduce material new evidence or establish government misconduct, adding that a new trial was unlikely to result in an acquittal.

Ms. Holmes is scheduled for sentencing on Nov. 18. Earlier Monday, a court probation officer submitted a presentence report, an investigation into Ms. Holmes's legal and personal background. The judge previously denied her request for an acquittal. He also denied requests for an acquittal and new trial from Ramesh "Sunny" Balwani, Ms. Holmes's former boyfriend and deputy at Theranos, who was found guilty on 12 counts of fraud and conspiracy in a separate trial that concluded in July.

Turnover at Apple has hindered efforts to replace the head of product design, leaving a gaping hole at the helm of a prominent team that's been key to the iPhone maker's prolonged success. From a report: Legendary design leader Jony Ive departed Apple in 2019, and his replacement for hardware design lasted just about three years. Now the department -- still in Ive's shadow -- needs a new leader at a time when there are few obvious choices. And the fate of Apple's hardware devices, which accounted for more than three-quarters of its nearly $400 billion in revenue last year, hangs in the balance. Evans Hankey, who has held the job since Ive left, informed Apple last month that she will be departing. Though Hankey had been at the company for about 20 years, her relatively brief tenure at the top of the industrial design team made it hard to establish a distinct vision for new products. Apple also lacks a clear succession plan for the job, a significant problem for a company that sells premium-priced products largely based on their look.

An anonymous reader shared this report from long-time tech pundit Robert X. Cringley. "A Distributed Autonomous Organization (DAO) called OrangeDAO is cooperating with a small seed venture fund called Press Start Capital to establish the OrangeDAO X Press Start Cap Fellowship Program for new Web3 entrepreneurs.

"Successful applicants get $25,000 each plus 10 weeks of structured mentorship plus continued access to the more than 1200-member OrangeDAO network. In exchange, OrangeDAO and Press Start get to invest in the resulting companies, if any, produced by the class." Cringley likens it to the American tech startup accelerator Y Combinator — but on steroids.

Cringley also explains why he thinks this "middle class VC" model "will replicate and grow unconstrained," ultimately exporting itself from Silicon Valley to cities around the world. There are many DAOs around and hardly anybody understands them or knows what they are good for. Mainly they have seemed to be involved in the NFT market. But OrangeDAO is different. It has 1200+ members and every one of those members is a graduate of the Y Combinator startup accelerator. They are verified Y Combinator company founders, so they've all had similar entrepreneurial experiences and see business much the same way as a result. OrangeDAO seems to have big plans and to make those plans happen in August the DAO, itself, raised $80 million in venture capital, with their first use of that capital being these Fellowships.

I think this will change forever venture capital and the world economy.

It represents a new stage in the evolution of venture capital. In many senses it is the democratization of VC....

The DAO members all have similar backgrounds, similar values, and similar risk tolerances. THERE ARE MORE OF THEM, so they can do bigger deals. And — here's the important bit — THEY ARE ALL Y COMBINATOR-EDUCATED and connected globally through the blockchain. They not only know many of the same things, they have a sense of where this knowledge comes from and why it is useful.... In the YC-based DAO we have people who want the next generation of entrepreneurs to be even better-educated. It's not some egalitarian goal, either: they see it as key to success for the whole thing.

Smart people with good ideas will self-identify, be funded at a subsistence level to allow them to develop those ideas and prove their worth, then they can participate on a truly level playing field for the first time.... Gone is the Tycoon, gone is the professional VC who doesn't understand his tech, gone soon will be the angels (subsumed into the DAO model), and gone for the most part are the asshole VCs whom entrepreneurs grow to hate (not all of them, but a lot).

Done correctly, this model is essentially Meritocratic VC. If the idea is good, the market is ready, and the people know what they are doing, the capital will be there.

Eric Schmidt wants to reshape Washington's industrial policy to combat an intensifying US-China tech rivalry. The former Google chief executive officer's philanthropic arm issued recommendations aimed at encouraging US politicians to counter China's rising technological ambitions by ramping up regulatory scrutiny, encouraging more private investment and offering tax credits to train workers. From a report: China surprised the US on key "battleground" technologies -- including wireless 5G, microelectronics and AI -- as the Asian nation's industrial policy enabled it to dominate markets for drones, high-capacity batteries, critical minerals, solar panels, turbines and shipbuilding, the Schmidt-backed Special Competitive Studies Project said Tuesday in a report.

"The US has some immense economic advantages, but there are some warning lights flashing," Liza Tobin, the project's senior director and a former China director for the US National Security Council, said on a call with reporters. "The US needs an America-style industrial strategy that leverages competition in our dynamic private sector and has carefully targeted incentives in sectors where we need to lead." The report calls on the US government to boost microelectronic production with the help of a large fund to unlock private capital, create an open-source security center to assist investments in digital infrastructure, establish a national security commission on digital finance and give regulators more power to screen investment flows to China that could threaten US national security.

Gartner, the prestigious tech research and consulting firm, has released its annual predictions for "strategic tech trends" in the coming year.

Forbes offers a summary. Some highlights: Digital Immune Systems. [A]ntiquated development and testing approaches are no longer sufficient for delivering robust and resilient business-critical solutions that also provide a superior user experience. A Digital Immune System combines several software engineering strategies such as observability, automation, and extreme testing to enhance the customer experience by protecting against operational and security risks. By 2025, Gartner predicts that organizations that invest in building digital immunity will increase end-user satisfaction through applications that achieve greater uptime and deliver a stronger user experience.

Applied Observability. The path to data-driven decision making includes a shift from monitoring and reacting to data to proactively applying that data in an orchestrated and integrated way across the enterprise. Doing so can shorten the time it takes to reach critical decisions while also facilitating faster, more accurate planning. Gartner notes observable data as an organization's "most precious monetizable asset" and encourages leaders to seek use cases and business capabilities in which this data can deliver competitive advantage.
"By 2025, Gartner predicts that 50% of CIOs will have performance metrics tied to the sustainability of the IT organization," Forbes writes. But they also note that Gartner is predicting platform engineering — "a curated set of reusable self-service tools, capabilities, and processes" to speed up and optimize development. "Gartner predicts that by 2026, 80% of software engineering organizations will establish platform teams."

They're also predicting "adaptive" AI that can change after being deployed. But Forbes summarizes Gartner's related prediction, that AI leaders "increasingly must bake governance, trustworthiness, fairness, reliability, efficacy and privacy into AI operations" to improve adoption and user acceptance. This will include tools that "make AI models easier to interpret and explain while improving overall privacy and security."

PC Magazine offers this summary of a related prediction from Gartner: "By 2025, without sustainable AI practices, AI will consume more energy than the average European country, offsetting any environmental gains that AI creates by 25%."

Gartner also predicts a phasing out of marketing that uses social media sites' data about individuals — and that fully virtual workspaces "will account for 30% of the investment growth in metaverse technologies and will 'reimagine' the office experience through 2027," writes PC Magazine: [Gartner Fellow Daryl Plummer] said people need to reimagine how work will be done. He said that few people want to go back to the office full-time, but that virtual participants in calls often feel like second-class citizens. A fully immersive world is an answer to this, he said, with the interactive experience more important than information exchange. He believes metaverse experiences will be where people collaborate in ways they couldn't do in the office, blurring the line between home and work.

By 2025, "labor volatility" will cause 40% of organizations to report a material business loss, forcing a shift in talent strategy from acquisition to resilience. Plummer talked about revamping the way talent is valued. He said people don't want to do just one thing, but want to be "versatilists," which makes them more valuable to the company and less likely to leave.

America's Securities and Exchanges Commission received a letter Thursday from Colorado Senator John Hickenlooper urging clearer regulations of digital assets: The lawmaker asked the agency to clarify what types of digital assets are securities, address how to issue and list digital securities, establish a registration service for digital asset security trading platforms, set regulations on how trading and custody of digital assets should be carried out, and determine what disclosures are required for potential investors to be informed about. "Given the complexity of these issues, and recognizing that some digital assets are securities, others may be commodities, and others may be subject to a completely different regulatory regime, a formal regulatory process is needed now," Hickenlooper wrote in his letter.

"This will significantly improve policy development and allow the SEC to collect views and understand concerns. Furthermore, it will create clear rules that will benefit investors who currently may not be fully aware of the risks associated with digital asset investments...."

Hickenlooper also wrote that applying old market regulations to cryptocurrency would lead to financial services being more expensive and less accessible; leading to the agency's disclosure regime being less useful to U.S. residents. "I recognize these questions are complicated, but it is time for the SEC to engage. Empowering innovators, fostering financial innovation, protecting investors, and ensuring market integrity are consistent principles," the lawmaker concluded in his letter. "I look forward to working with you to build prudent rules as this powerful technology continues to develop."
Meanwhile, the Securities and Exchange Commission wants some changes of its own, reports Reuters: The U.S. Congress should give the Commodity Futures Trading Commission more powers to police cryptocurrency stablecoins to reduce risks to the financial system, Securities and Exchange Commission Chair Gary Gensler said on Friday.... With around $150 billion in market capitalization, stablecoins have many similarities to money market funds, and need to be regulated accordingly, Gensler said at a conference held by Georgetown University's Psaros Center for Financial Markets and Policy in Washington.... "I think the CFTC could have greater authorities. They currently do not have direct regulatory authorities over the underlying non-security tokens," he said....

The Financial Stability Oversight Council, a U.S. regulatory panel comprising top financial regulators, earlier this month recommended that Congress pass legislation addressing the risks digital assets pose to the financial system, including bills to bolster oversight of crypto spot markets and stablecoins. It remains unclear when Congress might pass crypto-related legislation, although several bills have been introduced to address stablecoins and digital commodities regulation.

The US Department of Energy has proposed regulations to financially reward cybersecurity modernization at power plants by offering rate deals for everything from buying new hardware to paying for outside help. The Register reports: In a notice of proposed rulemaking published earlier this week (which nullified a similar 2021 plan), the DoE said the time was right "to establish rules for incentive-based rate treatments" for utilities making investments in cybersecurity technology. The DoE said these included products and services, and information like plans, policies, procedures and other info related to cybersecurity tech. [...] In addition to stimulating voluntary security improvements, the proposed policy also encourages utilities to join cyber threat information sharing programs, and mandates regular reports for the duration of incentives.

The DoE's proposal includes a long list of things it said would be eligible for incentive-based rate treatments. While it's too long to include here, the DoE's language about what it will allow means it could essentially include anything that could "materially improve cybersecurity," be that a product, service or info-sharing program. The DoE said that hardware incentives would have a five-year depreciation period, while activities would cease to be incentivized once they become mandatory. As for how the rewards would be applied, the proposal specifies two methods: A return on equity (RoE) of 200 base points (2 percent) that would be applied to transmission rates, and a cost-recovery deferral that would allow them to amortize equipment purchased and treated as a regulatory asset.

The Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine was awarded to Svante Paabo on Monday for his discoveries concerning the genomes of extinct hominins and human evolution. From a report: It was the first of several prizes to be given over the next week. The Nobel Prizes, among the highest honors in science, recognize groundbreaking contributions in a variety of fields. "Through his pioneering research, Svante Paabo -- this year's Nobel Prize laureate in physiology or medicine -- accomplished something seemingly impossible: sequencing the genome of the Neanderthal, an extinct relative of present-day humans," the Nobel committee said in a statement. "Paabo's discoveries have generated new understanding of our evolutionary history," the statement said, adding that this research had helped establish the burgeoning science of "paleogenomics," or the study of genetic material from ancient pathogens.

Nils-Goran Larsson, a professor in medical biochemistry for the Karolinska Institute in Stockholm, said that Dr. Paabo had used existing technology and his own methods to extract and analyze the ancient DNA. "It was certainly considered to be impossible to recover DNA from 40,000-year-old bones," Dr. Larsson said, adding later that the discoveries would "allow us to compare changes between contemporary Homo sapiens and ancient hominins. And this, over the years to come, will give us huge insights into human physiology."

A new treatment for amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, or ALS, has been approved by the US Food and Drug Administration. CNN reports: The FDA announced approval of Relyvrio, developed by Amylyx Pharmaceuticals, on Thursday. The oral medication works as a standalone therapy or when added to other treatments, according to the company, and it has been shown to slow disease progression. Patients and some advocacy groups had urged the FDA to approve the drug, as there are limited treatments available for ALS, and the agency granted priority review in December.

In November, Amylyx submitted a drug application to the FDA for the medication, then called AMX0035, as an oral ALS treatment, seeking approval based on a Phase 2 trial that included 137 people with ALS who received either the drug or a placebo for 24 weeks. The study was funded in part by a grant from the ALS Ice Bucket Challenge, the viral social media campaign that started in 2014 involving people dumping buckets of ice water over themselves to raise awareness and money around ALS. The trial also showed that the drug was generally well-tolerated, but there was a greater frequency of gastrointestinal events in the group getting the medication. Amylyx is now continuing to study its safety and efficacy in a Phase 3 trial. In March, the Peripheral and Central Nervous System Drugs Advisory Committee voted 6-4 that a single Phase 2 trial did not establish the conclusion that the drug is effective in treating ALS.

One key difference between the FDA advisory committee's March and September meetings is that in the later meeting, Amylyx indicated that if the drug was approved but its Phase 3 trial results fail to confirm the drug's benefits, the company would consider withdrawing the drug from the market, Lynch said. She added, however, that the company didn't say specifically what it would view as a failure. "So at the vote, the advisory committee members switched, and most of them said, 'Yes, we are now convinced that this product should be approved.' And when they were asked why they changed their minds, some of them said, 'Well, the company said they would withdraw,'" she said. "And they were also convinced by patients' testimonies that they very much want to try this drug." But overall, the FDA's approval was based on Phase 2 trial data, which, Lynch said, may send a message to other pharmaceutical companies that they don't need robust Phase 3 trial data to get products on the market. Although people with ALS want access to this promising drug, there are concerns that such a message could open the door more broadly to the approval of medications that have not been proved to work, says Holly Fernandez Lynch, an assistant professor of medical ethics and health policy at the University of Pennsylvania. "The FDA could later withdraw those products if needed, she said, but doing so without voluntary company agreement is 'a huge pain' and often requires a very lengthy process," reports CNN.