Scientists in China successfully transplanted a genetically modified pig liver into a brain-dead patient, where it functioned for 10 days. The liver, modified to reduce immune rejection, produced key proteins and bile, showing compatibility and offering hope for future short-term xenotransplants. The Guardian reports: The surgery, at a Chinese hospital last year, is thought to mark the first time a pig liver has been transplanted into a human. It raises the prospect of pig livers serving as a "bridging organ" for patients on the waiting list for a transplant or to support liver function while their own organ regenerates. [...] The latest procedure was carried out in a 50-year-old man diagnosed with brain death after a severe head injury. The patient's own liver was intact and, in a surgery that took more than 10 hours, the organ taken from a genetically modified Bama miniature pig was plumbed into his blood supply as an additional liver.

The pig had six genetic modifications aimed at preventing immune rejection. These included deactivating genes that contribute to the production of sugars on the surface of pig cells, which the human immune system attacks, and introducing genes that express human proteins to "humanize" the liver. After the transplant, the pig liver showed signs of functioning, including producing bile, which helps break down fats in the digestive system, and porcine albumin, a blood protein. The team behind the advance, described in the journal Nature, said it was not clear whether the liver would have been able to fully support the patient, given that he had an existing liver and because the liver was removed after 10 days at the request of his family.

The U.S. has added 80 entities to its export blacklist to prevent China from acquiring advanced American chips for military development, including AI, quantum tech, and hypersonic weapons. The Verge reports: More than 50 of the new entities added to the list are based in China, with others located in Iran, Taiwan, Pakistan, South Africa, and the United Arab Emirates. BIS says the restrictions have been applied to entities that acted "contrary to US national security and foreign policy," and are intended to hinder China's ability to develop high-performance computing capabilities, quantum technologies, advanced artificial intelligence, and hypersonic weapons.

Six of the newly blacklisted entities are subsidiaries of Inspur Group -- China's leading cloud computing service provider and a major customer for US chip makers such as Nvidia, AMD, and Intel -- which BIS alleges had contributed to projects developing supercomputers for the Chinese military. The Beijing Academy of Artificial Intelligence is another addition to the list, which has criticized its inclusion. "American technology should never be used against the American people," said Jeffrey Kessler, Under Secretary of Commerce for Industry and Security. "BIS is sending a clear, resounding message that the Trump administration will work tirelessly to safeguard our national security by preventing U.S. technologies and goods from being misused for high performance computing, hypersonic missiles, military aircraft training, and UAVs that threaten our national security."

The United States has won far more Nobel Prizes in physics, chemistry, and medicine than any other nation, with the UK and Germany following in second and third place, according to an analysis of nearly 900 prize-winning publications.

Universities account for roughly three-fourths of Nobel Prize-winning research, with a small number of elite institutions producing a disproportionate share of winners. Cambridge University leads with 32 prizes, followed by Harvard (22) and Columbia (13). While prizes are concentrated among researchers from the US, UK, and Germany, 43 countries have produced at least one scientific Nobel laureate.

Outside Europe and the Anglosphere, Japan leads with 11 prizes, while Argentina, China, and India have only one or two each. The average age of Nobel Prize winners has steadily increased from about 45 in the 1920s to 65 in the 2010s, though the age at which scientists perform their groundbreaking work has remained relatively constant at around 40.

"In a conversation with Tony Yu from Asus China, AMD CEO Lisa Su shared that the Radeon RX 9000 series graphics cards have quickly become a huge hit, breaking records as AMD's top-selling GPUs within just a week of release," writes Slashdot reader jjslash. TechSpot reports: AMD CEO Lisa Su has confirmed that the company's new Radeon RX 9000 graphics cards have been a massive success, selling 10 times more units than their predecessors in just one week on the market. Su also stated that more RDNA 4 cards are on the way, but did not confirm whether the lineup will include the rumored Radeon RX 9060. When asked about the limited availability of the new cards, Su said that AMD is ramping up production to ensure greater supply at retailers worldwide. She also expressed hope that increased availability would help stabilize pricing by discouraging scalping and price gouging.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Bloomberg: Jack Ma-backed Ant Group used Chinese-made semiconductors to develop techniques for training AI models that would cut costs by 20%, according to people familiar with the matter. Ant used domestic chips, including from affiliate Alibaba and Huawei, to train models using the so-called Mixture of Experts machine learning approach, the people said. It got results similar to those from Nvidia chips like the H800, they said, asking not to be named as the information isn't public. Hangzhou-based Ant is still using Nvidia for AI development but is now relying mostly on alternatives including from Advanced Micro Devices and Chinese chips for its latest models, one of the people said.

The models mark Ant's entry into a race between Chinese and US companies that's accelerated since DeepSeek demonstrated how capable models can be trained for far less than the billions invested by OpenAI and Alphabet Inc.'s Google. It underscores how Chinese companies are trying to use local alternatives to the most advanced Nvidia semiconductors. While not the most advanced, the H800 is a relatively powerful processor and currently barred by the US from China. The company published a research paper this month that claimed its models at times outperformed Meta Platforms Inc. in certain benchmarks, which Bloomberg News hasn't independently verified. But if they work as advertised, Ant's platforms could mark another step forward for Chinese artificial intelligence development by slashing the cost of inferencing or supporting AI services.

An anonymous reader shares a Bloomberg column: Worries over China's "3D" problem -- that deflation, debt and demographics are structurally hampering growth -- are melting away. Instead, investors are talking about how the world's second-largest economy can take on the US and challenge its technological dominance. There is the prevailing sense that China's "engineer dividend" is finally paying off. Between 2000 and 2020, the number of engineers has ballooned from 5.2 million to 17.7 million, according to the State Council. That reservoir can help the nation move up the production possibility frontier, the thinking goes.

In a way, DeepSeek shouldn't have come as a surprise. Size matters. A bigger talent pool alone gives China a better chance to disrupt. In 2022, 47% of the world's top 20th percentile AI researchers finished their undergraduate studies in China, well above the 18% share from the US, according to data from the Paulson Institute's in-house think tank, MacroPolo. Last year, the Asian nation ranked third in the number of innovation indicators compiled by the World Intellectual Property Organization, after Singapore and the US. What this also means is that innovative breakthroughs can pop out of nowhere. [...]

More importantly, China's got the cost advantage. Those under the age of 30 account for 44% of the total engineering pool, versus 20% in the US, according to data compiled by Kaiyuan Securities. As a result, compensation for researchers is only about one-eighth of that in the US. Credit must be given to President Xi Jinping for his focus on higher education as he seeks to upgrade China's value chain. These days, roughly 40% of high-school graduates go to universities, versus 10% in 2000. Meanwhile, engineering is one of the most popular majors for post-graduate studies. It's a welcome reprieve for a government that has been struggling with a shrinking population.

schwit1 writes:

A compact, deep-sea, cable-cutting device, capable of severing the world's most fortified underwater communication or power lines, has been unveiled by China -- and it could shake up global maritime power dynamics.

The revelation marks the first time any country has officially disclosed that it has such an asset, capable of disrupting critical undersea networks. The tool, which is able to cut lines at depths of up to 4,000 metres (13,123 feet) -- twice the maximum operational range of existing subsea communication infrastructure -- has been designed specifically for integration with China's advanced crewed and uncrewed submersibles like the Fendouzhe, or Striver, and the Haidou series.

China's Cyberspace Administration and Ministry of Public Security have outlawed the use of facial recognition without consent. From a report: The two orgs last Friday published new rules on facial recognition and an explainer that spell out how orgs that want to use facial recognition must first conduct a "personal information protection impact assessment" that considers whether using the tech is necessary, impacts on individuals' privacy, and risks of data leakage. Organizations that decide to use facial recognition must data encrypt biometric data, and audit the information security techniques and practices they use to protect facial scans. Chinese that go through that process and decide they want to use facial recognition can only do so after securing individuals' consent. The rules also ban the use of facial recognition equipment in public places such as hotel rooms, public bathrooms, public dressing rooms, and public toilets. The measures don't apply to researchers or to what machine translation of the rules describes as "algorithm training activities" -- suggesting images of citizens' faces are fair game when used to train AI models.

"China is considering trying to blunt greater U.S. tariffs and other trade barriers," reports the Wall Street Journal, "by offering to curb the quantity of certain goods exported to the U.S., according to advisers to the Chinese government." Tokyo's adoption of so-called voluntary export restraints, or VERs, to limit its auto shipments to the U.S. in the 1980s helped prevent Washington from imposing higher import duties. A similar move from Beijing, especially in sectors of key concern to Washington, like electric vehicles and batteries, would mitigate criticism from the U.S. and others over China's "economic imbalances": heavily subsidized companies making stuff for slim profits but saturating global markets, to the detriment of other countries' manufacturers...

The Xi leadership has indicated a desire to cut a deal with the Trump administration to head off greater trade attacks... Similar to Japan, the Chinese advisers say, Beijing may also consider negotiating export restraints on EVs and batteries in return for investment opportunities in those sectors in the U.S. In some officials' views, they say, that might be an attractive offer to Trump, who at times has indicated an openness to more Chinese investment in the U.S. even though members of his administration firmly oppose it.
The article notes agreements like this are also hard to enforce, "particularly when Chinese companies export to the U.S. from third countries including Mexico and Vietnam."

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Reuters: The Belgian prosecutor's office said on Tuesday that it has charged five people in connection with a bribery investigation in the European Parliament allegedly linked to China's Huawei. The five were detained last week. Four have now been arrested and charged with active corruption and involvement in a criminal organization, while a fifth faces money laundering charges and has been released conditionally. The prosecutor's officer did not disclose the names of those involved or give information that could identify them.

It said new searches had taken place on Monday, this time at European Parliament offices. Huawei said last week it took the allegations seriously. "Huawei has a zero tolerance policy towards corruption or other wrongdoing, and we are committed to complying with all applicable laws and regulations at all times," it said. The prosecutors have said the alleged corruption took place "very discreetly" since 2021 under the guise of commercial lobbying and involved payments for taking certain political stances or excessive gifts such as food and travel expenses or regular invitations to football matches.

Trend Micro uncovered an eight-year-long spying campaign exploiting a Windows vulnerability involving malicious .LNK shortcut files, which attackers padded with whitespace to conceal commands. Despite being reported to Microsoft in 2023, the company considers it a UI issue rather than a security risk and has not prioritized a fix. The Register reports: The attack method is low-tech but effective, relying on malicious .LNK shortcut files rigged with commands to download malware. While appearing to point to legitimate files or executables, these shortcuts quietly include extra instructions to fetch or unpack and attempt to run malicious payloads. Ordinarily, the shortcut's target and command-line arguments would be clearly visible in Windows, making suspicious commands easy to spot. But Trend's Zero Day Initiative said it observed North Korea-backed crews padding out the command-line arguments with megabytes of whitespace, burying the actual commands deep out of sight in the user interface.

Trend reported this to Microsoft in September last year and estimates that it has been used since 2017. It said it had found nearly 1,000 tampered .LNK files in circulation but estimates the actual number of attacks could have been higher. "This is one of many bugs that the attackers are using, but this is one that is not patched and that's why we reported it as a zero day," Dustin Childs, head of threat awareness at the Zero Day Initiative, told The Register. "We told Microsoft but they consider it a UI issue, not a security issue. So it doesn't meet their bar for servicing as a security update, but it might be fixed in a later OS version, or something along those lines."

After poring over malicious .LNK samples, the security shop said it found the vast majority of these files were from state-sponsored attackers (around 70 percent), used for espionage or information theft, with another 20 percent going after financial gain. Among the state-sponsored crews, 46 percent of attacks came from North Korea, while Russia, Iran, and China each accounted for around 18 percent of the activity.

fahrbot-bot shares a report from Reuters: BYD on Monday unveiled a new platform for electric vehicles (EVs) that it said could charge EVs as quickly as it takes to pump gas and announced for the first time that it would build a charging network across China. The so-called "super e-platform" will be capable of peak charging speeds of 1,000 kilowatts (kW), enabling cars that use it to travel 400 km (249 miles) on a 5-minute charge, founder Wang Chuanfu said at an event livestreamed from the company's Shenzhen headquarters.

Charging speeds of 1,000 kW would be twice as fast as Tesla's superchargers whose latest version offers up to 500 kw charging speeds. The new charging architecture will be initially available in two new EVs -- Han L sedan and Tang L SUV priced from 270,000 yuan ($37,328.91) and BYD said it would build over 4,000 ultra-fast charging piles, or units, across China to match the new platform. "In order to completely solve our user's charging anxiety, we have been pursuing a goal to make the charging time of electric vehicles as short as the refuelling time of petrol vehicles," Wang said.

"This is the first time in the industry that the unit of megawatt (charge) has been achieved on charging power," he said.

Intel's stock jumped nearly 19% this week. "However, in the past year through Wednesday's close, Intel stock had fallen 53%," notes Investor's Business Daily: The appointment of Lip-Bu Tan as CEO is a "good start" but Intel has significant challenges, Morgan Stanley analyst Joseph Moore said in a client note. Those challenges include delays in its server chip product line, a very competitive PC chip market, lack of a compelling AI chip offering, and over $10 billion in losses in its foundry business over the past 12 months. There is "no quick fix" for those issues, he said.
"There are things you can do," a Columbia business school associate professor tells the Wall Street Journal in a video interview, "but it's going to be incremental, and it's going to be extremely risky... They will try to be competitive in the foundry manufacturing space," but "It takes very aggressive investments."

Meanwhile, TSMC is exploring a joint venture where they'd operate Intel's factories, even pitching the idea to AMD, Nvidia, Broadcam, and Qualcomm, according to Reuters. (They add that Intel "reported a 2024 net loss of $18.8 billion, its first since 1986," and talked to multiple sources "familiar with" talks about Intel's future). Multiple companies have expressed interest in buying parts of Intel, but two of the four sources said the U.S. company has rejected discussions about selling its chip design house separately from the foundry division. Qualcomm has exited earlier discussions to buy all or part of Intel, according to those people and a separate source. Intel board members have backed a deal and held negotiations with TSMC, while some executives are firmly opposed, according to two sources.
"They say Lip-Bu Tan is the best hope to fix Intel — if Intel can be fixed at all," writes the Wall Street Journal: He brings two decades of semiconductor industry experience, relationships across the sector, a startup mindset and an obsession with AI...and basketball. He also comes with tricky China business relationships, underscoring Silicon Valley's inability to sever itself from one of America's top adversaries... [Intel's] stock has lost two-thirds of its value in four short years as Intel sat out the AI boom...

Manufacturing chips is an enormous expense that Intel can't currently sustain, say industry leaders and analysts. Former board members have called for a split-up. But a deal to sell all or part of Intel to competitors seems to be off the table for the immediate future, according to bankers. A variety of early-stage discussions with Broadcom, Qualcomm, GlobalFoundries and TSMC in recent months have failed to go anywhere, and so far seem unlikely to progress. The company has already hinted at a more likely outcome: bringing in outside financial backers, including customers who want a stake in the manufacturing business...

Tan has likely no more than a year to turn the company around, said people close to the company. His decades of investing in startups and running companies — he founded a multinational venture firm and was CEO of chip design company Cadence Design Systems for 13 years — provide indications of how Tan will tackle this task in the early days: by cutting expenses, moving quickly and trying to turn Intel back into an engineering-first company. "In areas where we are behind the competition, we need to take calculated risks to disrupt and leapfrog," Tan said in a note to Intel employees on Wednesday. "And in areas where our progress has been slower than expected, we need to find new ways to pick up the pace...."

Many take this culture reset to also mean significant cuts at Intel, which already shed about 15,000 jobs last year. "He is brave enough to adjust the workforce to the size needed for the business today," said Reed Hundt, a former Intel board member who has known Tan since the 1990s.

America's Vice President "expressed confidence Friday that a deal to sell TikTok and keep the social media app running in the U.S. would largely be in place by an April deadline," reports NBC News. (Specifically the Vice President said "There will almost certainly be a high-level agreement that I think satisfies our national security concerns, allows there to be a distinct American TikTok enterprise.")

The article adds that TikTok owner ByteDance "has not publicly confirmed negotiations with any potential U.S. buyer, nor has it confirmed its willingness to sell TikTok to a U.S. bidder." But ByteDance "favors" a deal with Oracle, according to an X.com post on Thursday from tech-publication The Information.

And today Politico adds that Oracle "is accelerating talks with the White House on a deal to run TikTok, though significant concerns remain about what role the app's Chinese founders will play in its ongoing U.S. operation, according to three people familiar with the discussions." [Oracle's discussions are happening] amid ongoing warnings from congressional Republicans and other China hawks that any new ownership deal — if it keeps TikTok's underlying technology in Chinese hands — could be only a surface-level fix to the security concerns that led to last year's sweeping bipartisan ban of the app. Key lawmakers, including concerned Republicans, are bringing in Oracle this week to discuss the possible deal and rising national security concerns, according to four people familiar with the meetings. One of the three people familiar with the discussions with Oracle said the deal would essentially require the U.S. government to depend on Oracle to oversee the data of American users and ensure the Chinese government doesn't have a backdoor to it — a promise the person warned would be impossible to keep.

"If the Oracle deal moves forward, you still have this [algorithm] controlled by the Chinese...."

The data security company HaystackID, which serves as independent security inspectors for TikTok U.S., said in February that it has found no indications of internal or external malicious activity — nor has it identified any protected U.S. user data that has been shared with China.

"The number of discrete GPU developers from the U.S. and Western Europe shrank to three companies in 2025," notes Tom's Hardware, "from around 10 in 2000." (Nvidia, AMD, and Intel...) No company in the recent years — at least outside of China — was bold enough to engage into competition against these three contenders, so the very emergence of Bolt Graphics seems like a breakthrough. However, the major focuses of Bolt's Zeus are high-quality rendering for movie and scientific industries as well as high-performance supercomputer simulations. If Zeus delivers on its promises, it could establish itself as a serious alternative for scientific computing, path tracing, and offline rendering. But without strong software support, it risks struggling against dominant market leaders.
This week the Sunnyvale, California-based startup introduced its Zeus GPU platform designed for gaming, rendering, and supercomputer simulations, according to the article. "The company says that its Zeus GPU not only supports features like upgradeable memory and built-in Ethernet interfaces, but it can also beat Nvidia's GeForce RTX 5090 by around 10 times in path tracing workloads, according to slide published by technology news site ServeTheHome." There is one catch: Zeus can only beat the RTX 5090 GPU in path tracing and FP64 compute workloads. It's not clear how well it will handle traditional rendering techniques, as that was less of a focus. In speaking with Bolt Graphics, the card does support rasterization, but there was less emphasis on that aspect of the GPU, and it may struggle to compete with the best graphics cards when it comes to gaming. And when it comes to data center options like Nvidia's Blackwell B200, it's an entirely different matter.

Unlike GPUs from AMD, Intel, and Nvidia that rely on proprietary instruction set architectures, Bolt's Zeus relies on the open-source RISC-V ISA, according to the published slides. The Zeus core relies on an open-source out-of-order general-purpose RVA23 scalar core mated with FP64 ALUs and the RVV 1.0 (RISC-V Vector Extension Version 1.0) that can handle 8-bit, 16-bit, 32-bit, and 64-bit data types as well as Bolt's additional proprietary extensions designed for acceleration of scientific workloads... Like many processors these days, Zeus relies on a multi-chiplet design... Unlike high-end GPUs that prioritize bandwidth, Bolt is evidently focusing on greater memory size to handle larger datasets for rendering and simulations. Also, built-in 400GbE and 800GbE ports to enable faster data transfer across networked GPUs indicates the data center focus of Zeus.

High-quality rendering, real-time path tracing, and compute are key focus areas for Zeus. As a result, even the entry-level Zeus 1c26-32 offers significantly higher FP64 compute performance than Nvidia's GeForce RTX 5090 — up to 5 TFLOPS vs. 1.6 TFLOPS — and considerably higher path tracing performance: 77 Gigarays vs. 32 Gigarays. Zeus also features a larger on-chip cache than Nvidia's flagship — up to 128MB vs. 96MB — and lower power consumption of 120W vs. 575W, making it more efficient for simulations, path tracing, and offline rendering. However, the RTX 5090 dominates in AI workloads with its 105 FP16 TFLOPS and 1,637 INT8 TFLOPS compared to the 10 FP16 TFLOPS and 614 INT8 TFLOPS offered by a single-chiplet Zeus...
The article emphasizes that Zeus "is only running in simulation right now... Bolt Graphics says that the first developer kits will be available in late 2025, with full production set for late 2026."

Thanks to long-time Slashdot reader arvn for sharing the news.

China has introduced regulations requiring service providers to label AI-generated content, joining similar efforts by the European Union and United States to combat disinformation. The Cyberspace Administration of China and three other agencies announced Friday that AI-generated material must be labeled explicitly or via metadata, with implementation beginning September 1.

"The Labeling Law will help users identify disinformation and hold service suppliers responsible for labeling their content," the CAC said. App store operators must verify whether applications provide AI-generated content and review their labeling mechanisms. Platforms can still offer unlabeled AI content if they comply with relevant regulations and respond to user demand.

OpenAI has warned the U.S. government that restricting AI models from learning from copyrighted material would threaten America's technological leadership against China, according to a proposal submitted [PDF] to the Office of Science and Technology Policy for the AI Action Plan.

In its March 13 document, OpenAI argues its AI training aligns with fair use doctrine, saying its models don't replicate works but extract "patterns, linguistic structures, and contextual insights" without harming commercial value of original content. "If the PRC's developers have unfettered access to data and American companies are left without fair use access, the race for AI is effectively over. America loses, as does the success of democratic AI," OpenAI stated.

The Microsoft-backed startup criticized European and UK approaches that allow copyright holders to opt out of AI training, claiming these restrictions hinder innovation, particularly for smaller companies with limited resources. The proposal comes as China-based DeepSeek recently released an AI model with capabilities comparable to American systems despite development at a fraction of the cost.

An anonymous reader shares a report: Germany's foreign intelligence service in 2020 put at 80%-90% the likelihood that the coronavirus behind the COVID-19 pandemic was accidentally released from China's Wuhan Institute of Virology, two German newspapers reported on Wednesday.

According to a joint report by publications Die Zeit and Sueddeutscher Zeitung, Germany's spying agency BND had indications that the institute had conducted gain-of-function experiments, whereby viruses are modified to become more transmissible to humans for research purposes.

It also had indications that numerous violations of safety regulations had occurred at the lab, the papers said. The spy agency assessment's was based on an unspecified intelligence operation code-named "Saaremaa" as well as on publicly-available data. It had been commissioned by the office of Germany's chancellor at the time, Angela Merkel, but never published, the report said.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from TechCrunch: Anthropic's CEO Dario Amodei is worried that spies, likely from China, are getting their hands on costly "algorithmic secrets" from the U.S.'s top AI companies -- and he wants the U.S. government to step in. Speaking at a Council on Foreign Relations event on Monday, Amodei said that China is known for its "large-scale industrial espionage" and that AI companies like Anthropic are almost certainly being targeted. "Many of these algorithmic secrets, there are $100 million secrets that are a few lines of code," he said. "And, you know, I'm sure that there are folks trying to steal them, and they may be succeeding."

More help from the U.S. government to defend against this risk is "very important," Amodei added, without specifying exactly what kind of help would be required. Anthropic declined to comment to TechCrunch on the remarks specifically but referred to Anthropic's recommendations to the White House's Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP) earlier this month. In the submission, Anthropic argues that the federal government should partner with AI industry leaders to beef up security at frontier AI labs, including by working with U.S. intelligence agencies and their allies.

Several Asian airlines have tightened restrictions on portable battery chargers amid growing concerns about fire risks, following a January blaze that destroyed an Air Busan aircraft in South Korea. South Korean airlines now require passengers to keep portable chargers within arm's reach rather than in overhead bins, a rule implemented March 1 to ease public anxiety, according to the Transportation Ministry. Taiwan's EVA Air and China Airlines have banned using or charging power banks on flights but still allow them in overhead compartments.

Thai Airways announced a similar ban last Friday, citing "incidents of in-flight fires on international airlines." Battery-related incidents on U.S. airlines have increased from 32 in 2016 to 84 last year, with portable chargers identified as the most common culprit, according to Federal Aviation Administration data. The International Civil Aviation Organization has banned lithium-ion batteries from cargo holds since 2016, though no industry standard exists for regulating power banks.