Author: Jezca Felarca

California startup Vivodyne said today that it has built what it calls the world’s largest biological datacenter, a robotic drug-testing setup that screens medicines on lab-grown human tissue rather than leaning so heavily on mice and dogs.

The company says the platform brings together software, robotics, and more than 20 tissue types, including liver, lung, and bone marrow, across 12 HIVE labs. The idea is to test safety and efficacy at a scale of about 3.1 million tissues per year, which Vivodyne says is roughly twice the scale of all U.S. clinical trials combined.

Vivodyne’s argument is straightforward: 90% to 95% of drugs that look successful in animal tests still fail in humans. If those failures can be spotted earlier with human tissue models, that could improve the pool of drugs that make it into human trials. The push also lines up with broader moves across the industry, including work from Emulate, CN Bio, and Hesperos, along with backing from the U.S. Food and Drug Administration after the 2022 Modernization Act 2.0.

If you track drug development, this is a platform to keep an eye on. It still doesn’t replace animal testing outright, though, because drug developers need whole-body biology too, including immune interactions, blood flow, and system-wide drug effects.

Vivodyne also says it has raised $79.6 million, including a $40 million Series A led by Khosla Ventures in May 2025, and that its expanded work will operate out of a new 23,000-square-foot lab in South San Francisco.

Apple is said to be testing memory chips from ChangXin Memory Technologies, or CXMT, China’s biggest DRAM maker, for future iPhones and MacBooks. If it moves forward, that would mark a real change from Apple’s usual dependence on Samsung, SK Hynix, and Micron.

People familiar with the matter say Apple is evaluating CXMT’s DRAM at a moment when the memory market is getting tighter. Apple has good reason to want another qualified supplier: less exposure if one vendor slips, and a stronger hand on both price and volume for a core component used across its products.

That pressure comes from the wider memory squeeze. Strong data-center demand for high-bandwidth memory is tightening supply and lifting prices for conventional memory along with it, so testing CXMT gives Apple a fallback if its current suppliers keep prioritizing more lucrative product lines or if pricing gets worse.

If you follow Apple’s hardware supply chain, this is one to watch. Politics could still put limits on it, though. Any Apple-CXMT arrangement would almost certainly draw US scrutiny, which makes standard off-the-shelf memory far more likely than deeply customized chips.

So don’t expect to see CXMT memory in the next iPhone 18 Pro. That product is already deep in development, CXMT’s production lines are said to be booked for the rest of the year, and its pricing may end up similar to, or even higher than, what Samsung and SK Hynix are charging.

There’s nothing for you to download here yet. Still, after CXMT’s July 2026 IPO and its push into LPDDR6, Apple’s testing looks a lot like a hedge on future supply flexibility.

The U.S. Government Accountability Office released an audit today on the Department of Government Efficiency, or DOGE, and its conclusion was blunt: the federal cost-cutting push overstated how much money it saved.

DOGE started out with a $2 trillion goal. Later, it put a $215 billion figure on its public “Wall of Receipts.” But when the Government Accountability Office reviewed about $110 billion of those claimed savings, it found that a large share of them couldn’t be verified, relied on faulty math, or came from actions that were already underway before DOGE even existed.

Some of the examples are hard to brush off. The Government Accountability Office said $27.4 billion came from contracts that were never actually terminated. The audit also found that nearly 2,000 of the 13,476 contracts DOGE claimed it had ended were still active. One Defense Health Agency IT contract, tied to $1.7 billion in claimed savings, was never terminated or modified at all, according to the audit. The Government Accountability Office also said 96% of the reported grant savings couldn’t be verified, and that 108 lease cancellations had already been set in motion before DOGE was created.

The audit was requested by U.S. Senators Gary Peters and Richard Blumenthal. They said DOGE had been deceptive and reckless. Outside policy and procurement experts were just as skeptical, describing it as startup-style behavior dropped into a system built around contracting rules, legal requirements, and long government timelines. Some said it looked less like real budget cutting and more like performance art.

If you followed DOGE through the viral claims and flashy receipt pages, this Government Accountability Office report changes the picture. You can read the audit on the Government Accountability Office website.

Nvidia began recruiting today for a new engineering team focused on the security of generative software. The move makes perfect sense: if companies place more trust in these systems, they’ll launch more services—and with that, they’ll need more computing power. That’s exactly where the company excels. The job postings reveal that this group will focus on security and protection, and this is no small team: among the positions being sought is even a “technical leader for the founding team.”

According to those same job postings, the work will include validating agents before deploying them to production and creating tools capable of detecting and correcting software vulnerabilities. The idea is to strengthen these systems before they enter real-world environments.

The initiative is part of a broader strategy by Nvidia.

The company has long been an advocate of open models. Its argument is that transparency and public scrutiny help strengthen both security and technological competitiveness. Jensen Huang, Nvidia’s CEO, has publicly defended this stance and maintains that it improves cybersecurity and reduces risks by allowing more researchers and developers to examine how the systems work.

And this is no minor matter for Nvidia.

Meta has released Meta Muse Code, a terminal-based coding assistant for macOS and Linux, and it’s clearly built for people working in real codebases, not toy projects.

Visual Studio Code Download

The company says you can install Meta Muse Code with a single command. From there, it’s meant to handle the full loop across large repositories: planning code changes, writing the code, and checking the results. Meta is also leaning on persistent background agents, plus an event log that lets you pick back up after a crash or any other interruption.

On pricing, Meta says the standard tier starts at $1.25 per million input tokens and $4.25 per million output tokens. There’s also a contributor tier that drops those rates to $0.10 and $0.20, but only if you agree to let Meta use your prompts and code for future training. That puts Meta Muse Code in direct competition with OpenAI Codex, Anthropic Claude Code, and GitHub Copilot, not just on performance, but on price too.

If you’re after a lower-cost coding assistant, this is probably an update worth trying. If your day-to-day work involves proprietary code, though, that tradeoff may be a lot harder to swallow.

The release lands in the middle of a broader rush around coding tools. Forecasts for the market are all over the place, from $4.2 billion in 2025 to somewhere between $6.9 billion and $40.7 billion by the mid-2030s. Meanwhile, 84% of developers already use these tools or expect to, while only 29% fully trust the code they generate. That gap matters, especially as Meta looks for new revenue beyond Llama. Meta Muse Code is available now on macOS and Linux.

In 2026, the bigger office story isn’t chatbots. It’s workplace automation tools. About 91% of businesses are using them at least a little, and they’re showing up in four main buckets: writing copilots, meeting summaries, enterprise search, and workflow agents. Nearly half of professionals say they use these tools every day, often quietly, in the background, to claw back about 5.4% of their weekly work time and make more room for decisions and customer-facing work.

If you manage people, this is something to watch closely, but the upside doesn’t show up automatically. Between 89% and 95% of firms still report no measurable impact on productivity, which tells you the same thing pretty clearly: new tools on top of old habits won’t do much. Workflows have to change. Spending reached $644 billion in 2025, 86% of organizations expect to raise their 2026 budgets, and the newer generation of agents is starting to do more than draft things faster. They’re beginning to change how work actually moves across teams.

There’s a downside, too. “Workslop” now affects 40% of U.S. desk workers, and cleaning it up eats nearly two hours, on top of the security risks, blurry accountability, and the slow loss of institutional knowledge. You can buy workplace automation tools through office suites, meeting apps, enterprise search products, and agent platforms. That part is easy. What still matters is having clear goals, proper training, and humans in the loop.

Australia does not, at this point, have a nationwide social media ban for under-16s. So when you see claims that Australian teenagers are still on social platforms months after a national ban supposedly kicked in, the premise is off from the start.

What Australia actually has is an argument that’s still unfolding. Opposition leader Peter Dutton says he’d require age checks if elected. Prime Minister Anthony Albanese has signaled he’s open to some form of action. And the pressure, coming from both sides of politics, has pulled in parents, platforms, regulators, and child-safety advocates.

South Australia has gone further than anyone else so far. It has put A$1 million into a state trial that would block children under 14, require parental consent for 14- and 15-year-olds, and bring in a citizens’ jury. Still, that’s a state-level test, not a national rollout.

That difference matters if you’re trying to follow the story. Supporters of a ban point to research linking social media use with anxiety, depression and other harms. They also raise concerns about addictive design, harmful content, and the social pressure these platforms can amplify, even if experts still argue over how direct those effects really are.

Critics make a different case. They say bans are a blunt instrument, could drive teenagers into less visible online spaces, and may do less good than education, platform accountability, and stronger digital literacy. Australian eSafety Commissioner Julie Inman Grant has made that argument herself.

For now, all you can really point to are proposals, plus the fights over age checks: privacy, accuracy, data storage. Add to that the moves underway in Florida and the UK, and one more gap stands out. The views of technology companies, and of teenagers themselves, still haven’t been explored enough.

Ukraine’s Western-supplied F-16s appear to have scored their first confirmed air-to-air kill on July 8 over eastern Ukraine: the reported downing of a Russian Sukhoi Su-35. The confirmation came from U.S. Joint Chiefs Chairman General Dan Caine.

Caine disclosed it publicly during a Senate Appropriations Committee hearing. If you track the air war closely, this one stands out. The Su-35 is one of Russia’s most capable multirole fighters, and until now Ukraine had used its F-16s mostly in a defensive role since they started arriving in the summer of 2024, mainly to intercept drones and cruise missiles.

So this matters on two levels, military and symbolic. It points to Kyiv possibly moving those Western-supplied F-16s into offensive counter-air missions against Russian crewed aircraft.

Ukraine hasn’t said which F-16 variant was involved or what missile was fired. Russian sources, for their part, claimed a Mikoyan MiG-29 may have been used as a decoy and that support from a Patriot air defense system may have helped set up a wider ambush. None of that has been independently confirmed. Russian military bloggers did say the Su-35 pilot ejected and survived.

Ukraine’s F-16s are older airframes, but they’ve been updated and can carry AIM-120 AMRAAM and AIM-9 Sidewinder missiles. Ukraine is also expected to receive about 85 to 100 of the jets from Belgium, Denmark, the Netherlands, and Norway. How much difference they make still comes down to the less glamorous parts of the equation: missiles, maintenance, spare parts, training, and tactics.