An AI just carried out a cyber attack without any human oversight for the first time- Security researchers have uncovered what they believe to be the first ever instance of an artificial intelligence agent executing a cyber attack from start to finish without human assistance. The AI-powered attack marks a major milestone for both artificial intelligence and cyber security, raising concerns that AI is lowering the barrier for cyber criminals. The fully automated campaign involved an AI carrying out a ransomware attack, where victims are forced to pay a ransom in order to regain access to their data.An AI just carried out a cyber attack without any human oversight for the first timeShareholdersunite Essentials is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.The recent initial public offering for SpaceX was the biggest stock sale the world has ever seen, with shares priced as if life on Mars were a sure thing. The company’s debt, on the other hand, is priced as if it were junk. Is this what F. Scott Fitzgerald meant when, nearly a century ago, he wrote, “The test of a first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposed ideas in the mind at the same time, and still retain the ability to function”?SpaceX, Elon Musk and the ‘Dumb Money’ ProblemThe language of the deal has left the two sides fighting over that point rather than making progress on a final agreement on Tehran’s nuclear program. “This gap in interpretation is wide, baked into the deal, and not exactly surprising,” said Michael Horowitz, an Israeli geopolitical analyst. “Washington has tried to convince Tehran that compliance would be more profitable, but this framing misses the point. Iran’s behavior isn’t driven by financial motives but by security concerns and bargaining leverage. It’s a power dynamic.”The Fight Over Hormuz Boils Down to One Poorly Worded Clause in Trump’s DealCoaching seminars held by the Norwegian Football Federation have been known to play a short video showing a 16-year-old boy taking part in a shooting drill. Footage has been captured from behind the goal and most of the 20 attempts, to be kind, are wayward. The aspiring coaches in attendance are asked if the youngster has what it takes to play for Norway. “Everyone says no because in the video it looks like a poor striker,” says Hakon Grottland, the long-standing head of player development within Norway’s national association. Perhaps the distinctive blond hair, kept short at the time, provides a clue but the boy spraying shots in all directions has become Norway’s talisman and the world’s best centre-forward: Erling Haaland.Why America has fallen for Erling Haaland, football’s most likeable superstarThe federal government is demanding that autonomous-vehicle companies address their driverless cars’ pattern of impeding or ignoring first responders and emergency vehicles. The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration has documented incidents of autonomous vehicles driving into active emergency scenes and blocking the paths of ambulances and firefighters. Autonomous vehicles have also failed to recognize traffic cones, flashing lights, and other safety threats such as smoke and fire, according to a Wednesday letter from NHTSA Administrator Jonathan Morrison.Federal Regulator Warns Robotaxis Are a ‘Danger’ to the PublicThere is a beautiful stupidity in the next great innovation of the food industry: food designed to make us want less food. Capitalism has finally eaten itself, and now it’s complaining that it feels a bit full. This is the strange promise of inulin-propionate ester, or IPE, a “supercharged” fibre developed by scientists at Imperial College London and the University of Glasgow. It has been approved by the European Food Safety Authority for use in food, which means products containing it – smoothies, cereal bars, bread and breakfast foods, the sort of things already wearing too many health claims for their own good – could start appearing in Europe within the next year.Why a type of ‘GLP-1’ weight loss fibre could soon be added to food to make you eat less Subramanian Iyer, an electrical engineer and educator, has long specialized in a sleepy niche of the semiconductor industry that has now become a major choke point in the global contest for artificial intelligence leadership. That niche is a technology called advanced chip packaging, which bundles as many as dozens of the components in palm-size modules. As computing gains from the traditional practice of shrinking transistors to pack more of them onto each chip have diminished, Nvidia and other chip giants have turned to packaging as an essential way to deliver semiconductors capable of more complex tasks for A.I.How a Niche Technology Became a Choke Point for A.I.The largest U.S. power grid operator, PJM Interconnection, said Friday it is under a federal emergency alert to reduce electricity consumption across its territory, as it battles generator outages, massive overloading on transmission lines, and a surge in air conditioning use from the current heatwave. PJM, which serves 67M people in the Mid-Atlantic, South, and Washington, D.C., areas, said the order applied to industrial and residential electricity users with contracts that pay them in return for mandatory consumption cuts during emergencies. PJM also told neighboring regional grids, including in New York and the Midwest, that its electricity exports from may be curtailed, a procedural step that allows those regions to plan accordingly.Largest U.S. power grid orders emergency curbs to avoid blackoutsThat commitment was tested 50 years ago. When the dictatorship seized power in 1976, the Argentine press fell silent. What readers found in most newspapers were official statements and stories about economic reforms or inflation. What they didn’t find, what was deliberately missing, was any meaningful coverage of the systematic disappearance of thousands of people. The Buenos Aires Herald was the exception. The commitment to revealing what was going on had begun even before the coup. In the early 1970s, Andrew Graham-Yooll was already publishing the names of those killed by armed organizations and by the illegal repression of the Triple A.150 years. One missionMore than half of adult smokers in the UK wrongly believe that vaping is as harmful or more harmful than cigarettes, making them less likely to switch to vapes and quit the deadly habit, research has found. Evidence from scientific studies shows that, while vaping is not risk-free, it is far less harmful than smoking tobacco, which produces thousands of chemicals, including toxic metals, poisonous gases and substances that cause cancer.Majority of UK smokers wrongly believe vaping is as harmful as cigarettes, experts findWhether you’re learning guitar or trying to get fit, short bursts of effort can work wondersFeeling stuck? Try ‘productivity snacking’Do you know how to get an American company to grant you excellent wages and amazing benefits, even for an entry-level job? Move to Norway and take the job there. Construction workers, hotel maids, gas station attendants and store cashiers will typically earn more than $20 an hour plus evening or weekend bonuses, about five weeks’ paid vacation each year, a pension, maternity and paternity leave that add up to a year and paid leave when a child is sick. You may even get paid time off if you move homes. Those are broadly the terms for Norwegian and foreign companies alike, including the likes of 7-Eleven shops, Burger King restaurants and ExxonMobil-affiliated gas stations. Which raises the question: If American and other international firms can offer such munificent terms for retail jobs in Norway, could they do so in our country?To understand how the Nordic socioeconomic system evolved, I dropped by the office of Kalle Moene, an economist at the University of Oslo. The system began in the 1930s, he said, when workers in thriving sectors of the economy agreed to hold down their wage demands to support sectors that were struggling. That principle — sacrificing to help those not doing so well — still underpins the region’s business model. Norwegians who are better off are willing to give up some income to ensure that people in blue-collar jobs get by. Moene argues that this wage compression promotes innovation and dynamism by boosting the profitability of growth industries and by lowering profits in lagging industries. “The lowest wages become higher, destroying bad jobs,” Moene said. “The highest wages become lower, creating more good jobs.”What We Should Learn From Nordic HappinessExperts say China trails the United States in A.I. development by just six months. Anthropic and other U.S. companies argue that without help from distillation, China would be much further behind, which could affect major A.I. uses like business planning, drug research, mass surveillance and military weapons. Their complaints have new urgency now that the Chinese start-up Z.ai has released an A.I. model, GLM-5.2, that is nearly as powerful as the top American systems. It rivals them when used for cybersecurity, an area that American A.I. companies and the Trump administration have singled out as vitally important to geopolitics. But what exactly is distillation, and are Chinese companies the only ones doing it? Here is an explanation.American A.I. Companies Say Chinese Copycats Are Quickly Catching UpMen’s average testosterone levels have halved over the past 50 years, according to scientists, who say society is facing a male fertility crisis. Total testosterone levels in men declined by 54% between 1972 and 2019, according to data presented at the annual meeting of the European Society of Human Reproduction and Embryology in London on Tuesday. Rising levels of obesity and diabetes are expected to play a part, but the team behind the work suggest that environmental factors such as endocrine-disrupting chemicals – which can be found in various household items – and global heating could also be factors in the apparent striking decline.Men’s average testosterone levels have halved in last 50 years, say scientistsIn How To Sleep Like a Caveman: Ancient Wisdom for a Better Night’s Rest, Dr Merijn van de Laar says stressing about sleep is the opposite of what we should be doing. Throw the “sleep hygiene” rules out of the window, he says – we need to change how we think about the eight-hour rule. “The evolutionary theories around sleep are amazing, because not many people know about them,” Van de Laar explains. “It’s very important to go back to the body – how the body is made and what we’re actually intended to do. The last couple of hundred years have seen such a rush into new technologies and into new science, but we still have those old bodies. “And to really understand something as ancient as sleep, you have to go back to the roots of it all.”The caveman sleep rules that will help you watch Mexico v England and not feel tiredFor a century, swimming in the dirty Seine was unthinkable. Now, a $1.6-billion engineering marvel has turned the French capital’s river into its ultimate summer escape.https://edition.cnn.com/2026/07/04/travel/paris-seine-river-toxic-swimming-spotsShareholdersunite Essentials is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.