below the surface Microsoft updates Intel-based Surface PCs, but regular people still cant buy them Businesses often use hardware and software that still needs x86 to run properly. Andrew Cunningham Jan 30, 2025 10:00 am | 12 Microsoft's new Surfaces are all business. Credit: Microsoft Microsoft's new Surfaces are all business. Credit: Microsoft Story textSizeSmallStandardLargeWidth *StandardWideLinksStandardOrange* Subscribers only Learn moreMicrosoft switched the Surface Pro tablet and both sizes of Surface Laptop from Intel and AMD's processors to Qualcomm's Arm-based processors last summer, part of a renewed hardware and software push to make the Arm version of Windows a thing. That ended a few years of a bifurcated approach, where the Intel and AMD versions of Surface PCs were the "main" versions and the Arm variants felt more like proof-of-concept side projects.But if you work in a large organization or you're an IT administrator, the bifurcated approach continues. Microsoft announced some business-only versions of the Surface Pro tablet and the Surface Laptop last year that continued to use Intel processors, and today it's announcing two more, this time using Intel's Lunar Lake-based Core Ultra CPUs.The refresh includes a new Surface Pro tablet and both 13- and 15-inch versions of the Surface Laptop, updated with most of the same design tweaks that the Qualcomm versions of the devices got last year (for example, a slightly larger 13.8-inch screen on the smaller version of the Surface Laptop, up from 13.5 inches). Generally, they have similar dimensions, weights, and configuration options as their Arm counterparts, including an OLED display option for the Surface Pro.Officially, Microsoft refers to the devices as the Surface Pro 11th Edition for Business and the Surface Laptop 7th Edition for Business, the same generation numbers it uses for the Arm-based Qualcomm Snapdragon versions it sells to consumers.The Lunar Lake processors include a neural processing unit (NPU) fast enough to qualify for Microsoft's Copilot+ PC label, which unlocks a few AI and machine learning-related features that aren't available on most Windows 11 PCs. At this point, many of those features are still in preview, including the overhauled Windows Recall, a feature called Click To Do that "identif[ies] text and images on your screen that you can take actions with," and an updated Windows Search that tries to do a better job understanding plain-language queries. For now, at least, it's worth noting that the Snapdragon Copilot+ PCs are all getting these features first, and so far, Intel and AMD PCs have gotten them weeks later.All the devices offer one of four possible Core Ultra CPUs (the 236V, 238V, 266V, and 268V); integrated Intel Arc graphics; 256GB, 512GB, or 1TB of storage; and either 16GB or 32GB of RAM. Some of the Qualcomm Surface devices offer as much as 64GB of RAM, but the Lunar Lake chips top out at 32GB.Per usual for its business-specific Surface devices, Microsoft isn't including pricing as part of its announcement today; these will probably vary based on the kind of organization that is buying them and how many devices they're buying. Microsoft's Surface USB4 Dock, a $200 accessory that's a bit cheaper and less capable than the old Surface Dock 2. Credit: Microsoft Microsoft is also launching a $200 Surface USB4 Dock for all Surface devices. It appears to be a slightly streamlined, somewhat less-capable version of the Surface Dock 2, with up to 65 W of power delivery, two USB-C ports, one USB-A port, an HDMI port, and an Ethernet port. The dock can connect to up to two external 4K displays using its USB-C and HDMI ports.Why make x86 Surface PCs just for businesses?Microsoft's x86-to-Arm app translation layer, now called Prism, is capable of running many legacy apps, and it has become much more common for developers to release both x86 and Arm-native versions of their Windows apps. But Windows and x86 processors were closely intertwined for decades, and lingering compatibility issues remain. Companies and other large organizations are more likely to have made large investments in obscure software or hardware that uses specialized drivers, things that can't be translated automatically by Prism and whose developers are less incentivized to prioritize niche features like Arm compatibility.If Microsoft is going to continue to design, manufacture, and sell Intel-based Surface devices anyway, we'd prefer that they be offered to the general publicsurely there are Surface-curious PC enthusiasts who need or would prefer an x86 machine to an Arm one for various reasons.Andrew CunninghamSenior Technology ReporterAndrew CunninghamSenior Technology Reporter Andrew is a Senior Technology Reporter at Ars Technica, with a focus on consumer tech including computer hardware and in-depth reviews of operating systems like Windows and macOS. Andrew lives in Philadelphia and co-hosts a weekly book podcast called Overdue. 12 Comments

OSIRIS-REx Bennu asteroid samples yield watery history, key molecules for life Clues as to how building blocks of life on Earth may have been seeded. Timothy J McCoy and Sara Russell, The Conversation Jan 30, 2025 9:59 am | 12 This photo of asteroid Bennu is composed of 12 Polycam images collected on Dec. 2, 2024, by the OSIRIS-REx spacecraft. Credit: NASA This photo of asteroid Bennu is composed of 12 Polycam images collected on Dec. 2, 2024, by the OSIRIS-REx spacecraft. Credit: NASA Story textSizeSmallStandardLargeWidth *StandardWideLinksStandardOrange* Subscribers only Learn moreA bright fireball streaked across the sky above mountains, glaciers, and spruce forest near the town of Revelstoke in British Columbia, Canada, on the evening of March 31, 1965. Fragments of this meteorite, discovered by beaver trappers, fell over a lake. A layer of ice saved them from the depths and allowed scientists a peek into the birth of the solar system.Nearly 60 years later, NASAs OSIRIS-REx mission returned from space with a sample of an asteroid named Bennu, similar to the one that rained rocks over Revelstoke. Our research team has published a chemical analysis of those samples, providing insight into how some of the ingredients for life may have first arrived on Earth.Born in the years bracketing the Revelstoke meteorites fall, the two of us have spent our careers in the meteorite collections of the Smithsonian Institution in Washington, DC, and the Natural History Museum in London. Weve dreamed of studying samples from a Revelstoke-like asteroid collected by a spacecraft.Then, nearly two decades ago, we began turning those dreams into reality. We joined NASAs OSIRIS-REx mission team, which aimed to send a spacecraft to collect and return an asteroid sample to Earth. After those samples arrived on Sept. 24, 2023, we got to dive into a tale of rock, ice, and water that hints at how life could have formed on Earth. In this illustration, NASAs OSIRIS-REx spacecraft collects a sample from the asteroid Bennu. Credit: NASA/Goddard/University of Arizona In this illustration, NASAs OSIRIS-REx spacecraft collects a sample from the asteroid Bennu. Credit: NASA/Goddard/University of Arizona The CI chondrites and asteroid BennuTo learn about an asteroida rocky or metallic object in orbit around the Sunwe started with a study of meteorites.Asteroids like Bennu are rocky or metallic objects in orbit around the Sun. Meteorites are the pieces of asteroids and other natural extraterrestrial objects that survive the fiery plunge to the Earths surface.We really wanted to study an asteroid similar to a set of meteorites called chondrites, whose components formed in a cloud of gas and dust at the dawn of the solar system billions of years ago.The Revelstoke meteorite is in a group called CI chondrites. Laboratory-measured compositions of CI chondrites are essentially identical, minus hydrogen and helium, to the composition of elements carried by convection from the interior of the Sun and measured in the outermost layer of the Sun. Since their components formed billions of years ago, theyre like chemically unchanged time capsules for the early solar system.So, geologists use the chemical compositions of CI chondrites as the ultimate reference standard for geochemistry. They can compare the compositions of everything from other chondrites to Earth rocks. Any differences from the CI chondrite composition would have happened through the same processes that formed asteroids and planets.CI chondrites are rich in clay and formed when ice melted in an ancient asteroid, altering the rock. They are also rich in prebiotic organic molecules. Some of these types of molecules are the building blocks for life.This combination of rock, water and organics is one reason OSIRIS-REx chose to sample the organic-rich asteroid Bennu, where water and organic compounds essential to the origin of life could be found.Evaporitesthe legacy of an ancient brineEver since the Bennu samples returned to Earth on September 24, 2023, we and our colleagues on four continents have spent hundreds of hours studying them.The instruments on the OSIRIS-REx spacecraft made observations of reflected light that revealed the most abundant minerals and organics when it was near asteroid Bennu. Our analyses in the laboratory found that the compositions of these samples lined up with those observations.The samples are mostly water-rich clay, with sulfide, carbonate, and iron oxide minerals. These are the same minerals found in CI chondrites like Revelstoke. The discovery of rare minerals within the Bennu samples, however, surprised both of us. Despite our decades of experience studying meteorites, we have never seen many of these minerals.We found minerals dominated by sodium, including carbonates, sulfates, chlorides, and fluorides, as well as potassium chloride and magnesium phosphate. These minerals dont form just when water and rock react. They form when water evaporates.Weve never seen most of these sodium-rich minerals in meteorites, but theyre sometimes found in dried-up lake beds on Earth, like Searles Lake in California.Bennus rocks formed 4.5 billion years ago on a larger parent asteroid. That asteroid was wet and muddy. Under the surface, pockets of water perhaps only a few feet across were evaporating, leaving the evaporite minerals we found in the sample. That same evaporation process also formed the ancient lake beds weve seen these minerals in on Earth.Bennus parent asteroid likely broke apart 1 to 2 billion years ago, and some of the fragments came together to form the rubble pile we know as Bennu.These minerals are also found on icy bodies in the outer solar system. Bright deposits on the dwarf planet Ceres, the largest body in the asteroid belt, contain sodium carbonate. The Cassini mission measured the same mineral in plumes on Saturns moon Enceladus.We also learned that these minerals, formed when water evaporates, disappear when exposed to water once againeven with the tiny amount of water found in air. After studying some of the Bennu samples and their minerals, researchers stored the samples in air. Thats what we do with meteorites.Unfortunately, we lost these minerals as moisture in the air on Earth caused them to dissolve. But that explains why we cant find these minerals in meteorites that have been on Earth for decades to centuries.Fortunately, most of the samples have been stored and transported in nitrogen, protected from traces of water in the air.Until scientists were able to conduct a controlled sample return with a spacecraft and carefully curate and store the samples in nitrogen, we had never seen this set of minerals in a meteorite.An unexpected discoveryBefore returning the samples, the OSIRIS-REx spacecraft spent over two years making observations around Bennu. From that two years of work, researchers learned that the surface of the asteroid is covered in rocky boulders.We could see that the asteroid is rich in carbon and water-bearing clays, and we saw veins of white carbonate a few feet long deposited by ancient liquid water. But what we couldnt see from these observations were the rarer minerals.We used an array of techniques to go through the returned sample one tiny grain at a time. These included CT scanning, electron microscopy, and X-ray diffraction, each of which allowed us to look at the rock at a scale not possible on the asteroid.Cooking up the ingredients for lifeFrom the salts we identified, we could infer the composition of the briny water from which they formed and see how it changed over time, becoming more sodium-rich.This briny water would have been an ideal place for new chemical reactions to take place and for organic molecules to form.While our team characterized salts, our organic chemist colleagues were busy identifying the carbon-based molecules present in Bennu. They found unexpectedly high levels of ammonia, an essential building block of the amino acids that form proteins in living matter. They also found all five of the nucleobases that make up part of DNA and RNA.Based on these results, wed venture to guess that these briny pods of fluid would have been the perfect environments for increasingly complicated organic molecules to form, such as the kinds that make up life on Earth.When asteroids like Bennu hit the young Earth, they could have provided a complete package of complex molecules and the ingredients essential to life, such as water, phosphate, and ammonia. Together, these components could have seeded Earths initially barren landscape to produce a habitable world.Without this early bombardment, perhaps when the pieces of the Revelstoke meteorite landed several billion years later, these fragments from outer space would not have arrived into a landscape punctuated with glaciers and trees.Timothy J McCoy is a supervisory research geologist at the Smithsonian Institution, and Sara Russell is a professor of planetary sciences at the Natural History Museum.This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.Timothy J McCoy and Sara Russell, The Conversation The Conversation is an independent source of news and views, sourced from the academic and research community. Our team of editors work with these experts to share their knowledge with the wider public. Our aim is to allow for better understanding of current affairs and complex issues, and hopefully improve the quality of public discourse on them. 12 Comments

Josie FordNuke the climateWe all know that climate change is dangerous, which means it can be tempting to take drastic measures to tackle it. Such as building a nuclear bomb orders of magnitude bigger than any to date and setting it off deep under the seabed.News reporter Alex Wilkins drew Feedbacks attention to this little scheme. It is the brainchild of Andrew Haverly, who described his idea in a paper released on 11 January on arXiv, an online repository without peer review.Haverlys plan builds on an existing approach called enhanced rock weathering. Rocks like basalt react with carbon dioxide in the air, slowly removing the greenhouse gas and trapping it in mineral form. By crushing such rocks to powder, we can accelerate this chemical weathering and speed up CO2 removal. However, even under optimistic estimates, this will only mop up a small fraction of our greenhouse gas emissions.AdvertisementThat is where the nuke comes in. A decent nuclear explosion could reduce a large volume of basalt to powder, enabling a huge spurt of enhanced rock weathering. Haverly proposes burying a nuclear bomb at least 3 kilometres below the Southern Ocean seabed. The surrounding rocks would constrain the blast and radiation, minimising the risk to life. But the explosion would pulverise enough rock to soak up 30 years worth of CO2 emissions.The first hurdle Haverly identifies is the scale of the bomb required. The largest nuclear explosion was that of Tsar Bomba, detonated by the USSR in 1961: it had a yield equivalent to 50 megatons of TNT. Haverly wants a bigger blast, a device with a yield of 81 gigatons, over 1600 times that of Tsar Bomba. Such a bomb, he writes solemnly, is not to be taken lightly.Quite how we are supposed to build this thing, then transport it to the notoriously windy Southern Ocean, safely lower it to the seabed, and then send it several km below said seabed, is very much left as an exercise for the reader. Haverly estimates this endeavour would cost around $10 billion dollars, which would indeed be a lot of bang for your buck considering the huge costs of climate change. However, Feedback has no idea how he came up with that figure.Anyway, nobody tell Elon Musk.Afterlife sneak peakEvery so often, Feedback experiences a revelation through the medium of social media. Our most recent one came courtesy of an X user called @pallnandi, an occupational therapist and unbiased realist, who on 12 January posted: Leaked photo of heaven is going viral on social media. No wonder Christians are so determined to get there! The accompanying image shows a city carved out of white stone, with architecture that looks like a cross between the Hagia Sophia mosque in Istanbul, the Colosseum in Rome and Rivendell from Lord of the Rings. The hundreds of windows all glow the same shade of golden yellow. Above the city is a dark, starry sky, with what looks like the Milky Way streaking across it.Hence Feedbacks revelation: that if you wait long enough, a long-debunked silly claim will circulate yet again.This one goes back to at least 1994, when the outlandish Weekly World News published a story headlined Heaven photographed by Hubble telescope. It included a blurry black-and-white image of a starfield, with a huge glow in the middle that contained a collection of posh-looking buildings. Anyone who remembers what Asgard, home of the Norse gods, looked like in the Thor movies will have about the right idea.It shouldnt need saying that this image wasnt from Hubble, or even NASA, and is fake. But it went viral as recently as February 2024, after being highlighted in videos on Instagram and TikTok.It isnt even a year later, and a new image with a similar tagline has gone viral. Several reports have pointed out that the image looks AI-generated: the Milky Way, in particular, has glitch-like patterns in it.Feedbacks real issue with it, though, is that it looks like a dreadful place. For starters, the stars are crystal-clear, which implies a distinct lack of air. It looks freezing cold and the structures are like something designed by Adam Drivers monomaniacal architect character in the movie Megalopolis. Sci-fi author Naomi Alderman waded in on Bluesky: Right so no animals or plants or trees or rivers or lakes just cold marble dark sky and no sun literally cant see any people. She likens it to the output of a terrifying neighbourhood committee which enforces absolute rigid uniformity.Maybe one day we will get an iteration of this meme where heaven actually looks like a nice place to spend eternity. But Feedback doesnt recommend holding your breath for it.A fishy finaleA press release alerts us to the new book Into the Great Wide Ocean: Life in the least known habitat on Earth, by Snke Johnsen. In it, the author explains what we know about life in the vast volume of water below the ocean surface, isolated from the air, the seabed and continental shelves. What is it like, Feedback wonders, to spend all your life in a place where only the force of gravity and a slight variation in light levels can tell you which way is up and which is down?We dont know, but we do know that the illustrator of this fishy tome is one Marlin Peterson.Got a story for Feedback?You can send stories to Feedback by email at feedback@newscientist.com. Please include your home address. This weeks and past Feedbacks can be seen on our website.

Like some other federal employees, Tony Ruiz received a deferred resignation email this week.The email offers what appears to be a buyout if he quits his job.Ruiz says he feels doubly targeted as a Latino and as a federal worker. But he has no plans to resign.This as-told-to essay is based on a conversation with Tony Ruiz, a 47-year-old Army veteran who works as a Veterans Service Representative at the US Department of Veterans Affairs.Like many federal employees, Ruiz received an email this week from the US Office of Personnel Management offering buyouts to federal workers who want to resign rather than work under the new administration. Ruiz's employment has been verified by Business Insider.Ruiz, who is Latino, says he feels like he's been hit by a double whammy: the resignation offer, and, before that, a letter from higher-ups asking workers to root out any examples of efforts to promote DEI, or diversity, equity, and inclusion.The following has been edited for length and clarity:I was hired in February of last year to be a veteran service representative at the US Department of Veterans Affairs, which is a role based out of Los Angeles.I work for the part of the VA that's in charge of all veteran benefits, and my job is really to assist veterans in all kinds of things. For example, if a veteran is trying to add dependents, needs to add a disability to his award, is going back to active duty, or is asking for help when it comes to homelessness, they put in a claim and it gets routed to an adjudicator like me.It's a chance for us to really help the veterans.I'm also a veteran of the US military myself. I served in the Army, with an honorable discharge in 2001. (I graduated from Basic Training in 1998.) Ruiz at his US Army Basic Training Graduation in 1998. Tony Ruiz When I was in the military, I had a dream to work for the federal government, and so to finally join this role a year ago, I was so excited to be serving my veterans.But in the last two weeks, things have been difficult.First, we got an email last week from the Acting Secretary at the US Office of Personnel Management, which said they're taking steps to close federal DEI initiatives because, they said, it's wasteful in government, it's shameful discrimination, and it's dividing Americans by race.Then it asks us to tell on our friends who are still doing DEI work and threatens us with adverse consequences if we don't.This first email caught all of us by surprise, and it really upset me.Then, this week, we got an email from OPM asking us if we wanted to resign by February 6.What really upset me was the fact that this email pretty much says to all of us, "We want you gone." It feels like they don't appreciate the value that we bring to the table.How can it be that I finally got my dream job after so many years, and yet now I have this situation where they want to get rid of me in a sense not just as a federal employee, but also as a Latino, born from Mexican immigrants, who are legal, and as an Army veteran who's serving my country proudly?They're telling me I'm no good in the sense that they're telling me I'm not wanted. And the people in the streets that are getting kicked out of the country, I feel like them, like I'm being deported from the federal government.With the emails that we've gotten, I can tell you people are afraid, people are nervous. Morale has been terrible to the point where people have been sick a lot in the last couple of weeks. And ever since the election, morale has been different. People are less talkative. It's palpable.But I'm not afraid. And I have no intention of resigning.In the military, we learned about bravery, about courage, and about service to our country. But one thing I learned as well that I think a lot of politicians and a lot of Americans forget is in the military, we had a rule and it was very clear: If you're given an order that's unlawful, like murder or whatever it is, it doesn't matter who it's from, you are to question that order and bring it up to the higher-ups. That's a very important thing.In other words, we're soldiers, we're not robots.Even though you're a military member, you love your country enough to be able to say, "No, this is not right." And so now that I'm serving my country here as a VA employee, that still stands to me.And that's why I'm not afraid.

OpenAI said this week that DeepSeek may have used OpenAI model outputs "inappropriately."OpenAI has been accused of doing the same thing with copyrighted content.What's that old saying about karma? Go ask ChatGPT. Or DeepSeek.In the brave new world of generative AI, there's a moment that everyone will experience. It's the realization that your original work is being used to train AI models that could be competing against you.This moment has arrived for OpenAI and CEO Sam Altman.The US startup said this week that Chinese lab DeepSeek may have "inappropriately" used OpenAI outputs to train new AI models in a process called distillation.Translation: We think you used our content without permission, and that's not allowed.For some AI experts, these complaints are hypocritical. OpenAI's success is built on a similar process. The startup has for years collected outputs and data from the internet and used that to train its own models. This includes scooping up copyrighted content and other original work from thousands of companies that have not authorized this use.In fact, this is what most model developers do, according to Nick Vincent, an assistant professor for computer science at Simon Fraser University, who studies how data is used in AI."These firms are simultaneously arguing for the right to train on anything they can get their hands on while denying their competitors the right to train on model outputs," he wrote in a blog this week. "Rules for thee, but not for me?"DeepSeek = just desertsVincent sees the rise of DeepSeek as the inevitable outcome of a training data free-for-all where AI companies take whatever content they want and ask for forgiveness later.This has now backfired on OpenAI, which may be having its own outputs plundered in the name of AI progress. The startup "will struggle to defend itself in the court of public opinion on this," Vincent told Business Insider on Wednesday."There's a reckoning coming."He hopes this reckoning will encourage tech companies to create a new system that gives appropriate credit and compensation to content creators."So far, none of the AI labs have seriously thought about this, so DeepSeek is their just deserts," Vincent added.Fair use just for OpenAI, or everyone?High-quality training data is a crucial ingredient of powerful AI models. Many of the companies that created this information want to be paid for providing intelligence to these new products. Tech companies don't want to be forced to pay. This dispute is being fought in court.OpenAI is being sued by authors who claim the startup is breaking copyright law by using their books to train AI models. The New York Times is pursuing a similar complaint.OpenAI has also been accused of using YouTube content to train its Sora video-generation model. YouTube CEO Neal Mohan said last year that if this is true it would violate the video platform's rules.OpenAI has denied breaking copyright laws, citing the"fair use" doctrine, which allows unlicensed use of copyrighted works in certain situations, including teaching, research, and news reporting.So, would DeepSeek's use of OpenAI's outputs also constitute fair use?"Very potentially, yes," Vincent said.Fair use isn't just for yourself when it's convenient. That would be, well, unfair.I asked OpenAI about all this on Wednesday and it didn't respond. The startup has partnerships with some companies that authorize the use of their content for AI model training. Axel Springer, the owner of Business Insider, struck one of these deals in 2023.Distillation and karmaHow do AI model outputs get scooped up for competitive means anyway?Distillation is the technical term for extracting intelligence buried in one model and weaving it into a new one, according to Vincent. AI godfathers, including Geoffrey Hinton, wrote a research paper about this in 2015 called "Distilling the Knowledge in a Neural Network."Back then, the researchers described a tamer version of this, where a lab or company would take its own old models and use outputs from them to cleverly infuse a new offering with more intelligence.Distilling intelligence from someone else's AI model without permission is frowned upon in some research circles but happens a lot, according to Vincent.DeepSeek'sresearch paperabout its new R1 model described using distillation with open-source models, but it didn't mention OpenAI."We demonstrate thatthe reasoning patterns of larger models can be distilled into smaller models, resulting in better performance," the Chinese lab's researchers wrote.Since these new offerings began rolling out late last year, some AI researchers have theorized that DeepSeek used outputs from OpenAI's new "reasoning" model, called o1, as synthetic data to improve its own models, such as R1.In December, when DeepSeek was beginning to wow the AI field, Altman seemed to take a dig at his new rival."It is (relatively) easy to copy something that you know works. It is extremely hard to do something new, risky, and difficult when you don't know if it will work," he wrote on X.What's that phrase about karma? I can't write it here. If you don't know, go ask ChatGPT. Or DeepSeek.

The US Agency for International Development (USAID) is not, in the scheme of things, a big part of the federal government. It dispersed $43.8 billion in the last fiscal year. That adds up to just 0.7 percent of the $6.1 trillion federal budget. USAID isnt even a full Cabinet agency, but a subset of the State Department.But USAID is worth paying attention to, both because it does important work that belies its size and status, and because its become an early case study in how the second Trump administration plans to dismantle major parts of the federal bureaucracy. On his first day back in office, Donald Trump signed an executive order placing a 90-day freeze on all foreign aid spending, a week before issuing a similar order affecting most of the rest of the federal budget. Secretary of State Marco Rubio took implementing the order seriously and issued stop-work orders for essentially all foreign aid on Friday. The pause was sweeping, including life-saving programs like PEPFAR, which provides AIDS drugs and preventative services to tens of millions of people. More than a week after Trumps first order, Rubio signed a partial waiver for humanitarian aid, including some AIDS drugs.Despite the orders questionable legality, sources in the agency tell me USAID staff largely complied. Nonetheless, the Trump team initiated a crackdown: About 60 senior leaders in the agency not political staffers, who usually leave when presidential administrations transition, but career civil and foreign service employees were placed on administrative leave on Monday. Acting Administrator Jason Gray explained the move in an all-staff email to USAID by citing several actions within USAID that appear to be designed to circumvent the presidents executive orders and the mandate from the American people. He did not cite any specific actions.In response to a request for comment, a USAID spokesperson wrote to Vox: We arent going to comment on personnel matters. We are judiciously reviewing all the waivers submitted and have a process in place to ensure urgent humanitarian aid continues. In line with the Presidents E.O. and to execute the implementation of the 90-day foreign assistance pause, several contracts have been paused to include personal services contracts (PSCs). These actions were not terminations or furloughs. These actions allow for a thorough and transparent review of the expenditure of all taxpayer dollars per the Presidents E.O. and Secretary Rubios guidance. There have been no furloughs, no termination of contracts or personnel under the foreign aid freeze E.O.While USAID may not comment on personnel matters, others say the consequences of putting these leaders on leave could be immense. This would lead to the destruction of US foreign assistance as we know it, Jeremy Konyndyk, a former veteran USAID official and current president of Refugees International, said in an interview. Thats probably something they want.Even this, though, was not the end of Trumps changes to the agency. So far he has also hit USAIDs contractor workforce, and his Office of Personnel Management has made USAID civil service staff vulnerable to reclassification and removal under so-called Schedule F moves.Disrupting USAIDs operations could quite literally cost people their lives. To pick one example, it is the primary implementer for the Presidents Malaria Initiative, which funded 36.8 million bednets and 48 million doses of malaria-preventing medication in 2023 alone; even with specific waivers, programs like this have been badly disrupted and lost crucial implementing staff.But this isnt just a story about USAID, but about a strategy that the Trump team is beta-testing there for disrupting the functioning of government agencies in general.Step 1: Pull the fundingTrumps Day 1 executive order was clear: All department and agency heads with responsibility for United States foreign development assistance programs shall immediately pause new obligations and disbursements of development assistance funds to foreign countries and implementing non-governmental organizations, international organizations, and contractors pending reviews of such programs for programmatic efficiency and consistency with United States foreign policy. It stated that the pause would be enforced by the Office of Management and Budget (OMB) through whats called apportionment.Apportionment is a usually quarterly process in which OMB allocates funds from yearly Congressional appropriations to specific agencies. In a normal administration, this is a mere formality meant to ensure that appropriated funds are not spent too quickly. But Trump is trying to use it to block the spending of congressionally appropriated funds altogether.This is part of a more general strategy called impoundment, previously attempted by Richard Nixon and the first Trump administration and roundly rejected by the courts as illegal. Trumps nominee to be OMB director, Russ Vought, and Mark Paoletta, his OMB general counsel, have vocally argued that the president has the power to withhold congressionally appropriated funding at will, so long as they do not spend in excess of what Congress appropriated. The Impoundment Control Act of 1974 passed by Congress explicitly states that they do not have this power, and courts have ruled that even before that law, this power did not exist. But the Trump team still insists that the law is unconstitutional and the court precedents are wrong.So far, the courts are holding to their view. On Tuesday evening, US District Court Judge Loren AliKhan issued a preliminary injunction temporarily blocking the freeze on federal grants; it did not explicitly address foreign aid and its implications there are unclear. On Wednesday, OMB rescinded its memo placing a freeze on all federal grants, though White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt claimed this didnt represent a policy reversal, but rather a clarification on Trumps executive orders.But initially, the order did in fact stop disbursements from USAID. The agency primarily works through implementing partners: for- and nonprofit contractors, nongovernmental organizations, and local government partners in developing countries that actually provide services for which USAID provides funding and/or technical assistance. The orders block to funds to foreign countries and implementing nongovernmental organizations, international organizations, and contractors thus effectively shut down USAIDs work entirely, according to multiple people working at the agency last week. If that were not clear enough, on Friday, Rubio issued a cable ordering employees to ensure that, to the maximum extent permitted by law, no new obligations shall be made for foreign assistance. So USAID couldnt fund its existing programs, and couldnt fund new ones.Step 2: Pull the peopleVolunteers at the Zanzalima Camp for Internally Displaced People unload aid delivery from USAID on December 17, 2021, in Bahir Dar, Ethiopia. J. Countess/Getty ImagesThe first time Trump was president, he tried to cut back on foreign aid spending too not through these impoundment moves, but through his budget proposals. But Congress rejected the cuts each time.This time, he brought back some of his political appointees from his first term, but with a new attitude. This new set of people feel like career government servants impeded their ability to pursue their vision of a MAGA agenda, Konyndyk observes.Multiple current and former USAID officials with knowledge of the situation cited Peter Marocco, the new head of the State Departments Office of Foreign Assistance (which oversees USAID), as the key mover on foreign aid so far this term. Marocco was reportedly in the Capitol during the January 6, 2021, insurrection, and served in the agency during Trumps first term, when his team issued a blistering 13-page dissent memo arguing he was incompetent and actively undermining their effectiveness.Consistent with a feeling of frustration with career staff, then, was the decision of USAID, under Maroccos supervision, to place roughly 60 senior officials on paid administrative leave on Monday evening. The leaders placed on leave span the majority of USAID bureaus; most staff at the agency headquarters in Washington, DC, reported to one of them, through one avenue or another, according to an official with knowledge of the list of people placed on leave. Notably, the Office of the General Counsel saw several leave notices, including two senior attorneys focused on ethics, according to three individuals with knowledge of the situation.Do you know how many people collectively are under the direct reporting lines of 60 career senior executive service staff and senior foreign service staff? one of the officials placed on leave asked me rhetorically. Some of them had dozens if not hundreds of people in their reporting lines, the official said, and the list seemed to include the vast majority of senior civil and foreign service staff at the deputy assistant administrator, senior deputy assistant administrator, or acting assistant administrator levels in DC.Acting Administrator Gray himself is a member of the senior executive service and not a Trump appointee, but he works under Maroccos authority.Adding to the disruption was the dismissal of the agencys institutional support contractors (ISCs). Devexs Elissa Miolene has reported that in the Bureau of Humanitarian Assistance, which handles USAIDs response to disasters like famines and earthquakes, ISCs have all been furloughed, meaning a 40 percent cut to the Bureaus workforce. An ISC in another bureau confirmed to Vox that they received furloughs too. While formally privately employed, these workers sit at USAID desks in the Ronald Reagan Building like any other staffer and are fully integrated into their team. Removing them amounts to a sudden, unplanned-for staffing reduction.As of this past September, some 13,215 people worked at USAID, of whom 2,578 were institutional support contractors, and 1,061 were personal services contractors (another major contractor category). Over one-fourth of the agency, in other words, are contractors, who under a stoppage of all foreign aid contracts cannot be paid. Much of the rest of the agency reported to career officials who are now on indefinite leave.Meanwhile, the 1,886 civil service staffers at the agency will have lesser protections under a memo promulgated Monday by the Office of Personnel Management. It enforces another Day 1 executive order that creates a new Schedule Policy/Career in the excepted service for positions that are of a confidential, policy-determining, policy-making, or policy- advocating character. Agencies are instructed to review their staffing and move any roles of this character into the new schedule, where civil servants can be dismissed more easily. Trump tried to do this in 2020, shortly before losing reelection, calling the new set of positions Schedule F; it appears to have been renamed Schedule Policy/Career.So any civil service officials still at USAID run the risk of being rescheduled to this new category, potentially setting them up for future dismissal. I cannot think of a civil servant at USAID that would not fit under the sweeping terms of it, a senior career official told me.More immediately, the administration has asked agencies for lists of career staff who are still within one-year probationary periods, making them easier to dismiss than longer-served staffers. This creates an implicit threat for USAID staff in this category: If they displease the administration for whatever reason, their probationary status can be invoked against them.Step 3: Instill fearPerhaps the most important function of the shock-and-awe campaign of funding freeze and mass administrative leaves has been to put the rest of USAIDs workforce on notice.If what youre trying to do is downsize an agency that you feel is bloated in a responsible way, you dont push out the 60 most senior staff and send home all the contractors who make the agency work, Konyndyk says. Those arent things you do if your concern is government effectiveness and efficiency. Those are things you do if you are trying to create an atmosphere of intimidation.The atmosphere included, per reporting by the Washington Posts John Hudson, removing all pictures of aid programs from the USAID headquarters; photos from the office show empty picture frames, with photographs of USAID staff and those benefiting from US foreign aid removed:The USAID staff I spoke with were mostly unwilling to be quoted due to fear of retaliation, and all of them described an atmosphere of uncertainty, unease, and omnipresent fear that one could lose ones job at any moment. This is not an environment in which one can imagine an agency of any kind operating effectively.As of this writing, the Trump administration has walked back its budget offices call for a total shutdown on government grants. But the January 20 executive order ordering impoundment of foreign aid has not been rescinded. One potentially dangerous endpoint here is that the administration reverses course on impoundment in general, while quietly continuing to withhold funding for specific programs, like foreign aid or clean energy. That is likely to provoke less backlash but as USAID is learning already, it has the potential to grind important government functions to a halt regardless.Youve read 1 article in the last monthHere at Vox, we're unwavering in our commitment to covering the issues that matter most to you threats to democracy, immigration, reproductive rights, the environment, and the rising polarization across this country.Our mission is to provide clear, accessible journalism that empowers you to stay informed and engaged in shaping our world. By becoming a Vox Member, you directly strengthen our ability to deliver in-depth, independent reporting that drives meaningful change.We rely on readers like you join us.Swati SharmaVox Editor-in-ChiefSee More:

I just finished writing a feature about the Video Game History Foundation in Oakland, California, and how it is preparing to share its digital archive of games magazines. From 30 January, youll be able to visit the institutes website and explore a collection of about 1,500 publications from throughout the history of games, all scanned in high detail, all searchable for keywords. Its a magnificent resource for researchers and those who just want to find the first-ever review of Tetris or Pokmon. I cant wait to visit.While researching the article, I spoke to John OShea and Ann Wain from the National Videogame Museum in Sheffield, which is also collecting games mags and other printed ephemera. They said something that really fascinated me. The museum is looking for donations to build its archive, but its focus is not so much on the magazines themselves, but on who brings them in. Were particularly interested in fan perspectives, OShea told me. Were not intending to develop an exhaustive collection of every video game magazine ever made were interested in the full suite of an individuals video game experience in how games connect to their lives. Wain continued: Were interested in the stories of why why did they collect these particular things, what were they looking for? Its that kind of social context were after.Collections are about memories more than facts and this applies to games and the cultural matter about them. Im writing this letter to you in my little cellar office, surrounded by piles of games, game magazines and game books. There are things in here that I cherish, including a copy of Devil May Cry signed by game designer Shinji Mikami, and my fathers Sega Mega Drive; there are also some endlessly useful and fascinating things, such as Steven Kents seminal book The Ultimate History of Video Games, and an old Sony personal video monitor, for which I bought special cables allowing me to connect very old consoles. What does all this stuff mean in the end, and what does it say about me?Jet Set Willy: as important as the Smiths. Photograph: YouTubeIm not sure. All I know is, when I happen on TikTok videos of peoples games collections I watch transfixed, over and over. I look at the console formats theyve bought and the magazines they read. It helps me to picture their journey through games history, which may be very different than mine. I think thats why the National Videogame Museum wants this sort of sociocultural context in its collections: the choices other people make are fascinating.Its such a shame that museums and academic institutions have only relatively recently been given the resources to collect material about video games. Although classic games are now being carefully archived, the VGHF estimates that 87% of classic video games released in the United States are critically endangered Im sure the situation is the same elsewhere in the world. Games discs and tapes deteriorate and become unplayable; the machines they ran on break down. Games magazines were considered ephemeral and throwaway, and are only now being seen as cultural artefacts in the same way as music and movie publications. Theres a lot of history to catch up on. If we really want to remember the youth culture of the 1980s, we need to think just as much about Jet Set Willy and Crash magazine as we do about the Smiths and NME.As OShea said in our chat, cultural memory exists in the detritus of our lived lives. Last year, a good friend and I went to the Naomi Campbell exhibition at the V&A. In one area, the curators recreated the models dressing room a chaotic explosion of discarded clothes, wet wipes and makeup. It told us as much about her as anything else on display. We are what we surround ourselves with, and what were passionate about. All my books and games are, in the end, me.Perhaps this is why I felt emotional when OShea and Wain talked about how games mags are important for their social and personal context. And actually, I had a very recent experience of their intimate value. A couple of weekends ago, I help my mum clear out a few old things at her house. In a dusty corner, we found a plastic bag that had obviously been safely stored away by my dad, who died in 2003. I discovered it contained a pile of games magazines that I had worked on Edge, DC-UK and others, as well as some copies of my first stories for the Guardian.I used to post him these things because he was interested in games and cool new gadgets. I thought hed have a quick flick through and chuck them out. But there it all was: my career in a plastic bag, as collated and archived by my dad. Those magazines are in my collection now once they were about me, now theyre about him. We all have a natural ability to share and ascribe cultural meaning and emotional value. As well as bringing us joy, the things we collect are a message to others. This was important once; take care of it and youll understand why.What to playThe Reuters game and story Cosy Comfort. Photograph: ReutersWhen is a news article not a news article? Um when its a game? Reuters has just run a lovely introductory article about cosy games such as Spiritfarer and Animal Crossing, which have proven mental health benefits for stressed or anxious players.The Reutuers feature is also an interactive role-playing game, Cosy Comfort, which allows you to guide a cutesy anthropomorphic Radish around the teeny village of Rootersville as you read, customising its clothes and house en route. This is such a lovely, relevant way to present a positive story.Available on: PC, Mac and smartphone Estimated playtime: skip past newsletter promotionSign up to Pushing ButtonsFree weekly newsletterKeza MacDonald's weekly look at the world of gamingPrivacy Notice: Newsletters may contain info about charities, online ads, and content funded by outside parties. For more information see our Privacy Policy. We use Google reCaptcha to protect our website and the Google Privacy Policy and Terms of Service apply.after newsletter promotionWhat to readIs a Sims rerelease on the horizon? Photograph: EA/MaxisThere are rumours that Electronic Arts is preparing to rerelease The Sims and Sims 2 to celebrate the games forthcoming 25th anniversary. Kotaku reports on teases from the publisher and I hope theyve got it right: the origins of this 200m-selling life sim havent been available to download and play for many years. I wonder if my old saves will work?Alice Bell has written a beautiful article for Eurogamer about how video game spaces have become memorials to friends we have lost. This makes complete sense in the digital era when so many relationships play out online and in virtual worlds.Yet more games industry job losses this week as Ubisoft announced it is closing its Leamington studio and downsizing Ubisoft Reflections in Newcastle, Ubisoft Dsseldorf and Ubisoft Stockholm. According to GI.biz, 185 staff will lose their jobs.What to clickQuestion BlockTunic is a game to bring an old friend back to the console again. Photograph: FinjiThis weeks question comes from Martha, who asks:My friend and I live together and we are avid gamers. Not into sport or platformers but we love all the modern greats; GTA, Last of Us, Uncharted, Days Gone, Horizon ZD and FW, Spider-Man (and Stardew Valley). You get the picture! A friend of ours who hasnt gamed since the 90s wants us to help get her into gaming again. So it needs to be something we enjoy with a good learning arc. What would you recommend? We are PlayStation gamers.Of the games youve mentioned, Spider-Man, Uncharted and Horizon are all excellent introductions to modern games and they all have good easy modes. If they were playing in the 1990s, they might recognise a few of the franchises still going today, so Rise of the Tomb Raider and Resident Evil Village might be a good idea. I also love Stellar Blade and The Quarry, which have quite a 90s gaming vibe to them. Also, as you mentioned, Stardew Valley, which has a real Super Nintendo look and feel, Id recommend Tunic and Roots of Pacha, which both look as if theyve come from that wonderful era.If youve got a question for Question Block or anything else to say about the newsletter hit reply or email us on pushingbuttons@theguardian.com.

Dune Awakening could be the biggest game in the survival genre since Palworld, and we had the chance to speak to Scott Junior, Executive Producer about the game's development

Dune: Awakening might be one of the most exciting shakeups of the survival sandbox in years, aiming to offer a slick experience from start to endgame and I've played it

Science & technology | What doesnt kill youWhy carbon monoxide could appeal to the discerning doperProfessional cycling is debating whether to ban the poisonous gasPhotograph: Getty Images Jan 30th 2025CARBON MONOXIDE is best-known as a poison. Each year around 30,000 people worldwide die from exposure to the gas, which can be produced by cooking stoves or indoor fires. But could it also have something to offer the hard-pressed athlete looking for an edge?Explore moreThis article appeared in the Science & technology section of the print edition under the headline Riding highFrom the February 1st 2025 editionDiscover stories from this section and more in the list of contentsExplore the editionReuse this content