Nine Senate Democrats supported a cryptocurrency bill coming out of committee. Trump and Republicans thought they had an easy win, but progressives in the Senate Democratic caucus have been sounding the alarm about crypto being used as a vehicle for corruption by the president, and have been demanding that the legislation contain stronger rules and regulations.
Senate Democratic Leader Chuck Schumer (D-NY) sided with the progressives and got Democrats to block the bill that Trump wants.
Nine pro-crypto Democratic senators are withholding their votes for legislation that would create rules for stablecoins — a type of crypto pegged to assets like the US dollar — in hopes they can convince Republicans to beef up the bill’s provisions on national security and consumer protection.
The European Union launched a drive on Monday to attract scientists and researchers to Europe with offers of grants and new policy plans, after the Trump administration froze U.S. government funding linked to diversity, equity and inclusion initiatives.
“A few years ago, no one would have imagined that one of the biggest democracies in the world would cancel research programs under the pretext that the word diversity was in this program,” French President Emmanuel Macron said at the “Choose Europe for Science” event in Paris.
“No one would have thought that one of the biggest democracies in the world would delete with a stroke the ability of one researcher or another to obtain visas,” Macron said. “But here we are.”
Taking the same stage at the Sorbonne University, European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen said that the EU’s executive branch would set up a “super grant” program aimed at offering “a longer-term perspective to the very best” in the field.
Late next month, Huawei will be testing its new powerful AI processor, the Ascend 910 D, even as by early May the previous 910C will start to be mass-delivered to scores of Chinese tech companies.
These serious breakthroughs are the next chapter of Huawei’s drive to counter Nvidia’s global monopoly in GPUs. The Ascend 910D is supposed to be more powerful than Nvidia’s extremely popular H100.
Huawei is pulling no punches in its race to manufacture a new generation of processors. Huawei has collaborated with SMIC – China’s largest semiconductor foundry – to apply Deep Ultraviolet Lithography (DUV) on what was previously only possible on EUV (Extreme Ultra-Violet technology). Once again, Huawei and SMIC defied the proverbial American “experts” with creative engineering solutions.
The volunteers running the experiment were not completely hands-off. Submitted ideas were screened according to a moderation policy, and redundant ideas were not posted. Ford says that 51% of ideas were published, and 31% were deemed redundant. About 6% of ideas were not posted because they were either completely off-topic or contained a personal attack.
But some researchers who study the technologies that can make democracy more effective question whether soliciting input in this manner is a reliable way to understand what a community wants.
One problem is self-selection—for example, certain kinds of people tend to show up to in-person forums like town halls. Research shows that seniors, homeowners, and people with high levels of education are the most likely to attend, Fung says. It’s possible that similar dynamics are at play among the residents of Bowling Green who decided to participate in the project.
“Self-selection is not an adequate way to represent the opinions of a public,” says James Fishkin, a political scientist at Stanford who’s known for developing a process he calls deliberative polling, in which a representative sample of a population’s residents are brought together for a weekend, paid about $300 each for their participation, and asked to deliberate in small groups. Other methods, used in some European governments, use jury-style groups of residents to make public policy decisions.
Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg appeared in federal court in Washington, D.C., for a second day on Tuesday, testifying about his intentions for acquiring Instagram in 2012.
In 2020, the Federal Trade Commission sued Facebook, which is now under the umbrella of parent company Meta, alleging it was in violation of antitrust laws by buying both Instagram and WhatsApp.
FTC lawyer Daniel Matheson pressed Zuckerberg on Tuesday over his internal message exchanges from 2012 with then-Facebook Chief Financial Officer David Ebersman regarding the $1 billion bid for Instagram.
Daniel Matheson, a lawyer for the Federal Trade Commission, departs following the first day of a historic antitrust trial about Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg’s intentions in acquiring Instagram, at Barrett Prettyman U.S. Court House in Washington, Monday, April 14, 2025. (AP Photo/Nathan Howard)
“[What] I’ve been thinking about recently is how much we should be willing to pay to acquire mobile app companies like Instagram and Path that are building networks that are competitive with our own,” Zuckerberg wrote to Ebersman, then agreeing with the chief financial officer when he said the purchase of Instagram would be a way to “neutralize a potential competitor.”
Extreme cosmic events such as colliding black holes or the explosions of stars can cause ripples in spacetime, so-called gravitational waves. Their discovery opened a new window into the universe. To observe them, ultra-precise detectors are required. Designing them remains a major scientific challenge for humans.
Researchers at the Max Planck Institute for the Science of Light (MPL) have been working on how an artificial intelligence system could explore an unimaginably vast space of possible designs to find entirely new solutions. The results were recently published in the journal Physical Review X.
More than a century ago, Einstein theoretically predicted gravitational waves. They could only be directly detected in 2016 because the development of the necessary detectors was extremely complex. Dr. Mario Krenn, head of the research group ›Artificial Scientist Lab‹ at MPL, in collaboration with the team of LIGO (“Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory”), who built those detectors successfully, has designed an AI-based algorithm called ›Urania‹ to design novel interferometric gravitational wave detectors. Interferometry describes a measurement method which uses the interference of waves, i.e. their superposition when they meet. Detector design requires optimizing both layout and parameters. The scientists have converted this challenge into a continuous optimization problem and solved it using methods inspired by modern machine learning. They have found many new experimental designs which outperform the best known next-generation detectors. These results have the potential to improve the range of detectable signals by more than an order of magnitude.