The Justice Department wants to know how to change a search engine monopoly
The US Department of Justice on Monday opened its antitrust trial against Google over its search engine business. Google’s lawyers argued that the DOJ’s list of remedies for the case is a “wishlist for competitors” and that it will enable competitors to get resources that took Google decades to develop. Google had been found to be a monopoly in the case.
Big Tech is back in court
A US court has ruled that Google’s purchase of DoubleClick does not hurt competition and its “ad tech” tools are “simple, affordable and effective”. However, the court also warned Google over its failure to preserve internal communications citing an internal messaging app which “deleted records of chats between employees”. Google had said it disagreed with the court’s decision.
The crusade against offshore wind has got even more serious under Donald Trump
The suspension of work on Empire Wind 1 offshore wind project in the US is being seen as one of the first actions taken by President Donald Trump’s administration. “If Trump had any ounce of compassion…he would be bolstering renewable energy projects like Empire that create stable jobs, allow families to breathe easier, and save more on electricity,” a Sierra Club official said.
The ad tech monopoly case came to an abrupt end
The UK High Court has ruled that Google’s online advertising practices are “likely anti-competitive”, allowing the US to continue its case. The case was filed in 2023 and concerns an intricate web of programs that sell ad space around the web, like on a news site or a recipes page. In its ruling, the court said Google’s acquisition of digital advertising platform DoubleClick didn’t harm competition.
Stem-cell therapies should not be rushed
Japan is working on a process to fast-track its regulatory approval of induced pluripotent stem (iPS) cells for the treatment of Parkinson’s disease, as per local media reports. The country is reportedly preparing to apply for a fast-track regulatory approval for some products based on iPS cells, in some cases perhaps even within the year.
Stem-cell therapies should not be rushed
A Japanese researcher has published a study showing that embryonic stem cell (ePSC) transplants can help treat a rare disease that leads to blindness. Masayo Takahashi, who was the first person totransplant cells from ePSC, is suffering from MDS (amyotrophic lateral sclerosis), a disorder in which the muscles, ligaments and other tissues of the body are damaged.
5 things you can learn from NPR’s reporting on the doge report
The National Labor Relations Board (NLrb) has said it is investigating DOGE, the independent agency that runs it, following a whistleblower’s disclosure of sensitive data allegedly accessed by its employees. The board said it is “deeply concerned about the allegations raised by the whistleblower” and “will take appropriate action to address them”. DOGE had dismissed the whistleblower in 2019 after he leaked confidential information.
Mark was suggesting that the social network should be spun off
Facebook Co-founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg took the stand in US Federal Trade Commission’s (FTC) antitrust case against Meta on Tuesday. Zuckerberg said that Meta’s market share of social media is around 30%. The FTC has alleged that Meta had illegally monopolized a subset of the social media market through its acquisitions of Instagram and WhatsApp, both of which the agency is seeking to unwind.
The impact of dogs on the environment can be mitigated by owners
Researchers have sequenced the complete genomes of six ape species, helping uncover Evolutionary History of our closest relatives and offering insights into what makes humans human. Human brain cells that were engineered to evade detection by the immune system restored muscle control in a rat model of Parkinson’s disease. The study is part of the process of developing a universal cell line.
There are prediction Sst transcriptomic types in the mouse visual cortex
We used the scrattch.hicat dataset on reference fluorescence-activated cell sorting-collected single-cell RNA sequencing dataset to compare the main transcriptomic types that make up each MET-type (MET-8, MET-4 was the Sstse Cbln4). The average expression of these genes and the fraction of cells with non-zero expression was calculated for the neurons of the three Sst MET-types in the patch-seq data.